Directories are not the same as search engines (see below). One directory that all webmasters recommend getting listed with is DMOZ (click DMOZ for their submission page). It's free to get listed but not always easy. Read the guidelines and adhere to them. Know that it may take awhile to get listed. Never give up on this one -- get listed even if it takes you a while to do so. Here is a forum for DMOZ that is invaluable: http://resource-zone.com/forum/. I used the forum to help me get my website listed.

There are other directories -- i.e. Yahoo. Here are some links that have most search engines and directories listed:

http://searchenginebase.com/
http://searchenginewatch.com/links/

Link exchange is actively seeking links from other sites. Done properly, this is the best way to get links. Here's how. You visit sites that are potential link partners (sites that have a similar theme as yours). If you find a site you want to swap links with, you place their link on your site, send them an email telling them you placed their link and where, and ask if they would place your link on their site. After that, cross your fingers. You can also ask in your email if they wouldn't mind sending you an email letting you know where they placed your link on their site.

Remember when I talked about Link Text in the on-site SEO section. Basically the same theory applies with link exchange. Even though the idea is the same, most people call it Anchor Text for off-site SEO. When you swap links with a webmaster, it's important that your anchor text reflect your keyword(s). Here is my code for Filipina Eyes Anchor Text:

<a href="http://www.filipinaeyes.com/" title="Filipina ladies">Online Dating Service for Filipina and Asian Ladies.</a> &#126; FilipinaEyes is a place where gentlemen can meet <b> Asian ladies</b> for love, romance and marriage

See the >Online Dating Service for Filipina and Asian Ladies< This is my anchor text. Just like link text, this is what someone would click to go to my website Filipina Eyes.

Lots of times when you visit a site to swap links with, they will have a form for you to fill out to swap links. For example:

Title: Online Dating Service for Filipina and Asian Ladies

Description: FilipinaEyes is a place where gentlemen can meet Asian ladies for love, romance and marriage

URL: http://www.filipinaeyes.com

They may ask for other information, but the above 3 are the most important. Title is what I want my Anchor text to be. The Description hopefully convinces the reader to come to my site and the URL is where the reader will go when the reader clicks on the Title/Anchor text (always include the http:// in the URL). Done right, I get more visitors, the Google spider sees my anchor text as important keywords and I get more memberships. When I first started I used FilipinaEyes as my anchor text. I don't know many people who search for a dating site using the query FilipinaEyes. I learn.

That's about it, but I do have some pet peeves.

I get a lot of request from webmasters asking me to exchange links, they provide me their link information without first placing my link on their site. I ignore these requests. This is not proper link etiquette. If I visit a site and want to swap links with them, I'll first put their link on my site before asking them to place my link -- this is proper link etiquette. Also at times, I'll get an email saying they placed my link without telling me where. Don't make me look for my link. If you indeed placed it, tell me where.

Lastly, and you'll have to get use to this one, you will swap links, all is proper, 2 months later you check and see that your link no longer exists. It's up to you if you want to email them and ask what's up or just delete their link from your site. They may of just moved your link and didn't tell you -- so a quick email may be more appropriate. It's your call.

I write articles and most of my one way incoming links are from articles I have written. I submit my articles to websites who specialize in article submission and in turn other websites find my article and place it on their site.

Your articles should have what they call a resource box. In the resource box you have your name, links to your website, etc. Usually resource boxes are placed at the bottom of the article.

This can be controversial. Here is the theory. Blogs are usually free. A lot of webmasters will create a blog, place their links on it to give them more links to their primary site. With that said, I think blogs with good content that benefit the readers have a legitimate place on the net. The biggest debate is when webmasters spam blogs. When you visit a blog, usually there is a section for comments. In that comment, a webmaster will put a link to his site (the same theory and controversy exist in spamming guest books, forums, etc). So the theory goes, visit hundreds of blogs, make a comment with your link to get more links to your site -- I think Google is wise to this practice.

You can subscribe to a site that gives you free space for a blog or you can get a blog program to create your own blogs.

Some people will use free hosts and domains to create a 3 to 5 page website and put their primary website link on every page. However, this doesn't make much sense. Think about it. If I create a site on a free domain, I still have to get incoming links to that free domain for it to have any significance for ranking/PR.

There are many places you can your site recognized. For example you can place a video on Youtube and hope people find your video so appealing they visit your site.

Blame Google for all the Page Rank (PR) Fuss. I'm not going to explain the formula, what I want to tell you is the reason why you need to pay attention to it. It's a measuring tool. What does it measure? It's Google's way to assign rank to a web page. The scale is 1 - 10 with 10 being the best. Its association with inbound links is why webmasters pay attention to it. For that matter, when looking for other link partners, I have seen sites state they won't swap with you unless you put their link on a page that is PR4 or higher (they don't stipulate if they in turn will put your link on a PR4 page or higher, hmmmmm). The theory is to create higher PR, you need to get more inbound links (note as of this writing PR seem to of lost some of its luster, but in the SEO world things can go in cycles -- maybe PR will regain its glory and everyone will be hustling to get higher PR).

You can download google's tool bar if you want to measure your PR or other website's PR. Here is the link to download Google's tool bar. Click google tool bar.

If you don't want to install the tool bar, here is a link to check out your page rank without installing the tool bar.

http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php

Here is another tool to check your page rank and also it has some great articles explaining all you want to know about PR.

http://www.freeweb-hosting.com/google_pagerank_pr_checker/

Want to read more articles about page rank. Check out SEO Guy's articles:

http://www.seo-guy.com/forum/archive/index.php/f-47.html

Since PR is related to links, let's take a second to talk about outbound links (again, I'm staying away from the formula, click one of the links above if you need this info). If you are swapping links, you are bound to have outbound links. It's probably a good idea to check your link page to be sure all your outbound links are active (not a dead link). I just did a check and found a few sites that no longer existed. I got rid of the dead links.

Of course the best link to get is what they call one way inbound link. That is a link to your site without having to give a link in return. Swapping links is not the way to do this. Writing articles is one way of getting one way inbound links. As the Rolling Stones said, "just use your imagination" and I'm sure you can think of other ways to get one way inbound links.

I could spend days talking about RSS, but here I want to give you a basic understanding of what it is. If I create valuable content and I want other sites to publish that content, I'll create a RSS document (also called RSS feed) as a XML file. You may of come across an XML file when you clicked on one of those little XML icons on a website. What is the purpose of this file? There is a program called a RSS aggregator (sometimes called RSS reader) that can read a XML file to display it's content. An RSS feed is read by subscribing the XML's URL to an RSS aggregator.

You can place an RSS feed anywhere, but blogs are what made them popular or did RSS feed make blogs popular? There is more to this technology than I'm going to cover here, but what I want you to envision is the linking possibility by using this technology. Lets break it down into steps.

(1) I create a blog. Knowing that someone may subscribe to my blog, I put links to my website in the blog.

(2) I also create a RSS feed for that blog. This feed is saved as a XML document. So I have done two separate things: created a blog and created a RSS feed in XML format. Now it is ready for the RSS world.

(3) I subscribe my blog/RSS feed to websites that specialize in RSS subscriptions. These same sites are how most people find RSS feeds for their RSS readers.

(4) A person or another website, has a RSS reader. They like my blog, so they copy the URL of my XML document and subscribe it to their RSS reader. Or, they may do a search for online dating and find my feed at one of the websites I subscribed to in step 3 above.

(5) Every time I update or add to the RSS feed, the reader will get this update automatically.

Let's stop there, do you see the linking potential? Let me also clarify some other things.

In step 1 above, I say I created a blog, but RSS feeds can be created for any HTML document. It doesn't have to be a blog. It's just that blogs use it so often most people associate RSS feed with blogs.

In step 2, creating an XML document is not that hard.

There are different RSS specifications: RSS 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0. Most readers can read 0.91 and it's easy to create.

In step 4, I talk about a person or website having a RSS reader. There are actually RSS readers used to view RSS feeds off-line and readers to view RSS feeds on-line. Someone can subscribe to my RSS feed with either type.

Step 5 above is the reason this is so popular. The person who has a RSS reader, doesn't have to check my site to see if there are any updates. The updates are sent to them automatically.

That is all I'm going to say about RSS. My purpose was to convey it's link possibilities. If it sparked your interest their are tons of websites that talk about RSS. Just google for RSS feed.