At some point in my learning curve I was failing to understand the true value of links. I used to think that the only benefit brought by links would be the incoming visitors from other websites. Very untrue! In fact, links are like votes. If a site links to you, the search engines see it like a vote for your site and place it above other sites in the search results.

If you manage to get many of them, not only you'll get your site indexed by the search engines faster, but you'll soon start receiving visitors - targeted visitors straight from the search engines.

But how do you gather links? Well, it's not that hard - here are 5 excellent ways to do it:

1. Submit to site directories - A directory is a human edited website containing a list of websites by categories. Some of them are totally free, others require a reciprocal link to get approved or even a monthly/yearly fee. Register, fill in your applications and wait for the results to come - if your site is a quality site, you'll get approved in most of them.

2. Submit to article directories - Write a top quality article and spread it across the Internet throughout article directories. The system is simple and it works like magic - the directories publish your article and other webmasters come and pick up the fresh content to display it on their websites. And with that, they're forced to display your author box containing links pointing back to your site.

3. Link out - Linking out to attract links? Of course! Some webmasters will notice the link and feel like they have to link to you too. Another more powerful method is to let the webmasters know about you linking to them. This will even put a little pressure on them resulting in a better response rate.

4. Post in forums - Forums posting is very useful in terms of SEO because it ensures one way targeted links – but it should be done very careful without upsetting the forum moderators. If you go to a forum, register and your first post is about how nice your site is and you even place a link within, you're most likely going to get your post deleted and your account banned for spam. However, some forums will allow a “signature” to be attached to each one of your posts - that's the legitimate way to do it.

5. Comment on blogs - Some blogs offer the possibility of commenting their articles. There are fewer and fewer of them, but there will always be some available. Many blog owners stopped their viewers from commenting due to spam – but pertinent straight to the subject comments will always be welcome. They important thing is that they offer the possibility of displaying a link to your website next to your post.

These are only a few of the methods that can be used to acquire links at a good rate. However, there are many other methods and many more things to consider before starting.