This blog post is my first in a series I’m calling SEO for Real People. I posted a great video by Matt Cutts, Google engineer, last week in which he described effective ways of getting other sites to link to yours. These are called inbound links (or incoming links) and are said to count for about a third of your score in Google’s ranking system. So they’re really important!

There are a lot of gimmick-y things people may do to try to get these links, a lot of which are mostly a waste of time. In Matt’s video he describes about 11 different effective strategies, but his examples are very technical. I wanted to offer some real life examples that my clients and friends can do themselves.

Matt’s last example near the very end of his video, is to give something away on your website. I love this one — it can be pretty easy to do for many businesses. For my friend Kelley Hughes, owner of Bounce Around (a party rental company), I recommended providing some free party invitations on her website. These are downloadable pdf files that visitors print themselves, so there is no cost to Kelley other than a couple hours of design time. This creates a nice perk for her customers, but the real goal is for mommy bloggers and parenting forum chatters to spread the word and link to her site. This is a long-term strategy — results won’t be seen overnight, but it will pay off over time.