Finally!  After starting several months ago, I am finally ready to come out with the last post to the top 10 online marketing tools project.  It’s a beautiful day here in Lawrence, KS, I’ve got the Black Keys playing through the speakers, and life is good.  Let’s finish this puppy up!

Ok, so the most important thing to any website besides traffic are other sites linking to that site.  When a search engines visits your site, it looks at the number of other sites that link to your site and takes that number into consideration.  The thinking is that, if site A has more links to it than site B and they are the same content wise, then site A must be more important; while would people have linked to it otherwise?

Now it would be easy to go out and buy a couple of hundred links from a link farm to help bolster your site’s backlinks number right?  Maybe.  This is a lazy way to get ranked within a Google page, and the easiest way to get “Google slapped” back to the back pages of your search term results.

The best way to get links is to have additional, peripheral sites that link to your main site.  My favorite idea is to use Kiva and other sites.  Kiva.org is a website that allows individuals to become micro lenders across the world.  It’s basically a charity, but it’s also great for the fact that it gives users 1) a text box and 2) a web site address field.

You can visit my lender page here: http://www.kiva.org/lender/thomas8470.

Notic e how on my profile it shows my company site?  See how it also allows me to enter some text, and keyword rich at that, to help describe my profile?  So does Google, and its a nice way to get some additional traffic to your site with a back link.

Back link strategy is some thing that must be used wisely because if you get too crazy with it, it becomes a monster unto itself and takes up too much time.

Lastly, I do believe that in the coming years businesses will do well to pick charities to team up with and promote on their sites.  Many people of Generation Y, myself included, don’t believe in businesses that operate solely for money’s sake and we look for companies that have strong community work as a central part of their message when researching businesses.