Search engine rankings these days depend upon links coming into you website. It's not just enough to optimize your web pages for the search engines these days to achieve the rankings you desire.

Incoming links have become one of the best ways to get the search engines to see your website. There are many means available to the webmaster to get incoming links. Here are a few of the best:

1. Articles
2. RSS feeds
3. Website Directories
4. One-way links from other websites
5. Reciprical links
6. Press Releases

Let's take a look at these methods at gaining link popularity with the search engines starting with articles.

Articles are one of the easiest means of getting links to your website. You write an article that is related and relevant to your website. This article should be between 600 and 1000 words long.

Once the article is written and edited, you then submit it to the various article directories. Article directories can be found by searching for them on Google or another search engines. You'll find directories like GoArticles.com, EzineArticles.com, or any number of them.

When submitting your article, you will have to supply certain information like the article title, article body, author's name, your email address, and a "resource box".

The resource box is very important. This will contain your URL link to your website. It should also be a mini-advertisement for your business, so word it carefully.

Submit your article slowly. The search engines don't like to see a ton of links showing up overnight. I'd submit to three directories each week for a month. Once the article is submitted to the directories, other websites and ezines will begin to use them and this is how your link is spread virally throughout the internet.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are another great means to get your URL linked to from other websites. An RSS feed is a page on your website written in .xml that other websites pick up and put your links on their pages for constantly changing content.

RSS links from your website are summaries of the various page's content with a link to that page. These provide "deep" links to your various web pages and are highly revered by the search engines. They allow others to scan your pages and content and vist your website without having to go through the whole site.

RSS feeds from your website not only give you incoming link popularity with the search engines but bring you traffic. They also alert the search engines that your website is "alive" and changing all the time.

As with articles, you can submit your RSS feed to directories to get your links around the internet. You can also place a "subscribe to my RSS feed" on your index page and other webmasters will end up using your RSS feed by subscription. This is a great way to get a new website off the ground, noticed by the search engines, and indexed quickly.

Website directories is another way to get one-way links back to your website from high ranking sites. It's easy to do too. Search for "website directories" on any search engine and you will find them. Most are free to submit to.

Pay strict attention to their ranking on the search engine's "results" pages. I'd only submit to those that have a ranking of six or higher. This increases your changes of higher rankings with the search engines.

One-way links from other, related websites are hard to get when you have a new website. But over time, if other webmasters find your site valuable, they will place links to you on their websites. Generally, from a resource page but nicer if they are embedded in the text of their pages.

You can speed up the process of getting these links by emailing the owners of related websites and politely informing them of your site. Most of the time though, they will want you to place a link to them on yours in exchange.

This is called reciprical linking. Here again, you can email webmasters and ask them to exchange links. Be sure that you only choose related, relevant websites to do this with. If you exchange links with a non-related site you might hurt your own ranking in the eyes of the search engines.

Finally, there's press releases. These are like articles except they are in the form of "newsworthy" stories. They should announce something about your website or business or mark a special event in your business. You will only find a limited amount of times you will want to make a press release.

It could be the grand opening of your business, the new website, a joint venture you are entering into, or maybe a new service you are offering. Events that are newsworthy have to be the focus or the press release will never get picked up.

Like with articles, there should be a URL link back to your website. Press releases are submitted to directories specializing in releases like PR Web. They will be distributed in a variety of ways such as through the internet, emails, print media, heck, any type of media.

The main point here is that if you want good rankings with the search engines, you have to have incoming links. Incoming links have to be part of your search engine optimization strategy. They show that other webmasters see value in your website.

You don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket when it comes to incoming links. I would try to get incoming links from all of the above methods. Just remember to build your links slowly and over time. This looks natural to the search engines. If you submit your URL to a ton of directories at once, the search engines think you're spamming them and you might be dropped altogether from their rankings.

Jim Bruce has been designing his own web sites and marketing online since 2000. He brings the expertise of experience to his web site design and online business writings. You can find out more about starting your own web site and online business at http://www.ristvinmarketing.com