Building links for improved traffic and better search engine position is a critical task many marketers struggle with. This article will show you how to build a whole network of backlinks for free.

The Web is built on links. Obviously the more links you have pointing to your Web pages the more traffic you can potentially receive. Ideally you'll have a lot of links from sites that are related to yours, thus resulting in relevant & targeted traffic.

In addition to direct traffic, a strong network of inbound links will positively influence your rankings in the major search engines. Again it's important that your links are coming from content that is related to your site.

One of the simplest and most effective link building tactics is to create a network of free content sites. With just a little work you can have dozens of relevant pages linking back to your target Websites. Listed below are the various elements of just such a link network.

Article Submission

Most people already understand the value of article marketing. But it's worth mentioning briefly to be sure.

Creating and submitting a large number of articles that contain links back to your Web pages is the ideal way to launch your own content & link network. You can submit articles to directories and contact blog and site owners directly with original articles.

Blogger

Blogger.com is the free blog network owned by Google. Opening an account takes only a few minutes, and then you can create as many separate blogs as you like.

It's a good idea to create a blog that focuses on only one or two core (and related) topic. And be sure to include good keywords in the name of your blog. This will allow you to link to your site from related content.

Be sure to create a number of keyword rich posts and to add a liberal number of keyword-anchored links from these posts. The Google spiders love Blogger and thus your sites will be indexed very quickly through the links you place from here.

WordPress Network

WordPress.com also has a free blog network. It's a good ides to open an account here and create a series of relevant blogs, which you can then link to your core sites and to your Blogger posts.
Remember to place solid keywords into the name of your blog. This will be your actual blog domain and will help with search engine optimization and the relevance of outgoing links.

Squidoo.com

Squidoo is a social media authority site. You can open a free account and then create as many lenses as you like.

A lens is a single page authority hub on a particular subject. So you'd want to create one or more lenses around specific keywords related to your primary Websites.

And of course you can link from these lenses to your main domain and many of your internal pages. You can also add the RSS feed for your Blogger and WordPress free blogs directly into your Squidoo lens, thus creating backlinks for those portals as well.

Google Pages/Google Sites

Google Pages is no longer accepting new members, but if you have an old account you never used now is the time to fire it up. Google Sites is now the place where Google free account holders can create free Web pages.

You can create separate accounts here, always using good keywords as your account name will be the actual subdomain name where your free site is located. Then you will be able to build a number of simple, content and keyword rich Web pages that all link back to your other free resources and of course to your primary Website.

In the above scenario, you are creating a multitude of Web pages and blog posts that talk about your core Website. These utilities will all link among themselves to create maximum exposure and to encourage search engine spiders to crawl your entire network.

And clearly each resource will link back to your main business site. This will result in the search engines indexing and ranking you from these free pages, and will also generate a good deal of organic traffic from targeted content.

Building a free link network is a simple process. As long as you apply quality content improved traffic and search engine position is an inevitable result of this strategy.