Everybody wants more free traffic from the search engines - and the easiest way to achieve it is to increase link popularity. That may sound easy enough, but in practise things are not always that simple. Well, "simple" is back if you follow the exact same technique I use to increase my sites link popularity and explode my free traffic. So dominating the first page of the search engines is now within your reach.

The 3 major search engines place a lot of importance on the number of incoming links to your site, but they also now how to spot if your link building campaign is natural or automated - and if they suspect for 1 second that it may be automated, all those links will count for nothing as the search engines will simply discard them.

But gaining hundreds or even thousands of quality and "search engine friendly" incoming links to your site is not hard if you know how to go about it. The trick is to make it look "natural" to the search engines - let me explain how to do it the easy way.

There's nothing wrong with getting hundreds of links in week 1, so long as you keep it up week after week. What I'm going to share here are 4 simple techniques you can start using today to build your link popularity naturally and safely, and with some automation.

The four different techniques are:

A new twist on how to increase link popularity with articles. Submitting your site to high PR web directories. A very powerful and highly effective approach to automated natural link growth. How the new "blogging for backlinks" works.

In part I of this article I'm going to cover some powerful techniques for increasing link popularity with articles. Now before you think you've heard all this before, hear me out as I'm pretty sure you haven't come across this system before.

There's 2 methods I use for building backlinks with articles - first I submit a unique article to a list of some of the top article directories online, and second, I use a brand new automated submission service that submits unique versions of a single article to up to 600 different articles directories. This automated system has been responsible for creating a steadily increasing number of links to my sites all on auto pilot.

If you're familiar with article marketing, you're no doubt well aware of the benefits of submitting unique articles to directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. But here's a couple more you may not be aware of that are equally effective - if not more so:

Helium.com BigArticles.com PheedCentral.com EzineArticles.com ArticlesFactory.com SearchWarp.com GoArticles.com

All these sites have great PR and are seen as "authority" sites by the big search engines - which means a link from these sites to yours, via your article, will carry a lot of weight towards your link popularity. I recommend you submit a unique article to each directory for greater impact in the engines (I'll explain why in a future article).

My second technique involves the use of an automated software system called Unique Article Wizard. It's a completely legitimate technique that has a "side effect" of also increasing the traffic to your site as well as your link popularity.

UAW will submit your article to the list of article directories that it supports, which at the time of writing is fast approaching 700 unique directories. That equates to almost 700 unique backlinks to your site, and all these sites are indexed by the three major search engines and have good pagerank. So each backlink from these articles counts.

However, the really neat thing about UAW is that it will create a totally unique version of your article before it submits it - so every one of those 700 directories will get a totally unique article.

If you understand the issues of duplicate content and search engine rankings, you'll know this is a very powerful feature. If you're not familiar with duplicate content penalties, don't worry about for now - just know that is huge benefit of this software.

Parts 2, 3 and 4 of this series will be out soon so watch out for them. Alternatively, to make sure you get immediate notification when they are published, sign up for my free newsletter at Octocat.com where I also share tips and techniques I use in my affiliate marketing business every day.