Linking is a matter of having something that many sites want. For example if you are giving away a free trip to Hawaii, and you let all of the websites know that their clients can apply for the free trip, they may add your link to their website because you tie your link in with the free trip entry form. This would work well in the travel industry, so you have to target whatever it is - to the industry that you want to target. For example, what travel agent wouldn't want to put on their site that you can win a free trip to Hawaii all expenses paid? But you have to do legwork and call them to let them know that it is a legitimate offer. Once you've built the credibility and you have what other sites would like to offer, then you will find the magic of how to obtain back links. This takes a lot of thought and each individual industry is unique and you don't have to give out freebees. For example, my site is for loans - not the best industry right now, but non-the-less there is a website that allows you to copy a script that creates a loan amortization calculator. Rather than build our own or pay to have it built, we used theirs and what did they get in return? A back link as it is in the script and when you install their calculator, you also add their link and cannot delete it - I tried. At the end of the day, if you have something to offer, you will get more backlinks than you ever wanted and if it is specific to your industry, the backlinks will be relevant. I am currently building a site tool that others can use for free that will have my site back linked attached to the tool so that any site that wants to use the tool for free can, but I will automatically get a backlink. This tool will take me a hundred hours to build and save me tens thousands of hours of trying to get or pay for backlinks. BTW: paying for backlinks is always available, but then you have to keep putting up the money or those links will disappear. So it's not worth paying for unless you are doing it temporarily while you are building organic backlinks. Want to know anything else, reply, as I am A self proclaimed expert at SEO work and I have the results to prove it. If anyone disagrees with this, I would like to know why? thx again
I agree. Creating cool widgets, scripts, etc. and giving them away for free could help your linkbuilding campaign. However keep in mind that Google do penalize sites if the anchor text is too spammy. Example: a chat widget can't promote sites in the real estate niche with anchor text like "real estate california"