One of the key components to any successful website is the number and quality of their inbound links.

There are many ways in which you can attract links to your site. Some good, some not so good!

One strategy that I have been using very successfully is to combine article writing with Google Alerts.

Here’s how it is done.

Step One: Write some articles.

Start writing articles and ideally make sure they are related in some way to your business.

I suggest you prepare at least a couple of articles and I would avoid writing them in Microsoft Word. Try to use something like Notepad. I’ll explain why in a minute.

When you have a couple of articles of about 400 to 700 words each, you should then submit them to the article submission sites.

Article submission sites are great for getting your articles distributed around the web. Not only do these sites send articles onto other article distribution networks, but lots of website owners come to these sites for content to put onto their own websites.

When you submit your article to one of the submission sites, you are allowed to add an “About the Author” paragraph to go with your article. It is here that you put a link back to your website using whatever keyword phrase you are trying to optimise on.

As you already have your article written you can simply cut and paste the article into the submission forms. I tend to have an “About the Author” paragraph already prepared to cut & paste as well.

Now the reason I suggested using Notepad for your articles is because when you copy from Word it tends to bring with it certain formatting issues and these can cause you article to be rejected by the submission sites. Notepad doesn’t have this problem.

Step Two: Find out who’s using your article.

By using Google Alerts you can set up alerts for each of your articles. I tend to use the article name is it’s fairly unique. Otherwise try using a distinctive line from your article.

Whenever Google finds your article, it sends you an email with the web address of the site where it found it.

You can now check out this site. If you think it will give you good traffic or pass on good page rank, you can contact the website owner. As they already have one of your articles then they probably like your material so you can either offer more articles (with links of course!) or even point them to pages on your site that they should link to because the content would be of interest to their visitors.

So there you have it. One of my tips for building links back to your site.

By the way, you might just like to put your website name into Google Alerts as you’ll be surprised how many alerts that can generate and you can also find many places mentioning your website.

Vernon Riley is a founder of KKSmarts. Their site contains many free guides covering all aspects of Website Promotion including free SEO Training.