It's essential for new websites to increase search engine visibility. One of the easiest ways for new websites to increase search engine visibility is through optimizing their content with long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are easier to rank for because they have low to medium competition and decent search traffic. However, no matter how keyword-rich your content is, nobody will find it unless your site's ranking improves through the accumulation of backlinks. The most important factor in increasing visibility on the search engines over time is link building. Building links is free albeit time-consuming.

Getting Free Backlinks

There are a number of ways you can obtain free backlinks. One way to do this is through submitting your site to directories. Manually submitting your site to all the directories out there can be a long and arduous process but it will allow you to build up to hundreds of backlinks. You can also submit a press release announcing your new site to free press release distribution services online. The creation of Squidoo lenses also allows you to insert hyperlinks to different pages of your website with anchor text containing your target keywords. Hubpages also allows you to do something similar.

Also consider creating profiles on social media websites and putting your link in the profiles. If you ever decide to do a social media campaign to promote your site, it could be useful to already have a branded presence on social media portals. Links on social bookmarking sites can also help your site get crawled by search engines.

Writing for free can in turn bring you lots of backlinks and traffic. If you are a blogger, write guest posts for popular blogs that link back to your blog. You can also write short articles on your niche topic and submit them to article directories like ezinearticles. Ezinearticles gives authors a small resource box where you can include two hyperlinks to your website with anchor text that contains target keywords.

Another effective way to build links and network to build traffic is to participate in forum discussions and put your link in your forum signatures. You can also get involved in blog commenting to build networking relationships with bloggers, add to the discussions going on, and link to your site. Holding contests and giveaways is another way to build links for your site and build traffic. You can also increase traffic to your site and build links by offering a free tool or widget for use on a popular social media site such as Twitter and then credit the tool back to your site with a link. You can pay a designer to come up with the tool for you if you can't do it yourself.

Additionally, find people to trade reciprocal links with. Do this by browsing webmaster forums to find link partners. It's important not to overdo reciprocal linking because an excessive amount of reciprocal links can make your site lose value. However, gradual and moderate reciprocal linking can be beneficial. Make sure to trade links with sites that are highly relevant to yours so you can also increase traffic to your site while you're at it.

Any new website owner that follows these simple and free link-building strategies will indeed manage to drive traffic to his/her website and accumulate links quickly. Building links can be a time-consuming process but the results are worth the effort because it is the #1 way to effectively improve search engine visibility.