Getting a high ranking for your site in Google requires good, frequently updated content and good inbound links. The content part is fairly straight forward, but how do you get other sites to link to you? Well, you can cross your fingers and hope that other sites find your content good enough to link to or put together a more proactive strategy.

Some linking strategy tips after the jump.

1. Participate in forums on well trafficked sites and make sure links to your site(s) are part of your signature.

2. Join a good link exchange site such as LinkPartners.com (free). Make sure you don’t join link farms such as LinksToYou.com. Sites like this use methods that are considered to be spamming by many search engines and could result in getting your site penalized.

3. Search Google using keywords which you’d like others to find your site with. Pick the top results and email them to see if they’d be willing to swap links with you. If the site is much bigger than yours in terms of traffic, offer to put their text/banner link in a prominent place on your site rather than just putting them on your links page. The PR you gain will probably worth much more than what you’d make selling out that space to an advertiser.

4. If you run a content site, see if you can arrange an interview with owners of sites which you’d like linking to you. Asking someone to link to your site is a lot easier when your site is promoting them.

Remember that the more inbound links the better. Linking to a site that does not link back to yours (reciprocal linking), causes your page and site to “bleed” Page Rank so make sure that you get a link back from any site you link to when possible. If you want to keep a page on your site where you place non reciprocal links, make sure you specify in your robots meta tag that that page is not to be indexed. You can also add the rel=“nofollow” attribute to the anchor tag of any link you don’t want search engines to count as outgoing links.

The higher the PR (page rank) of a site that links to you, the more it will raise your PR. This doesn’t mean you should only aim to have high PR sites link to you, having many lower PR sites can add up. Try to make sure the sites linking to you are relevant to your site, this way you’ll not only increase your ranking on Google but also get some visitors from the link itself.