The lifeblood of every website is traffic. Now we all know traffic doesn’t come just out of the blue. You get visitors when you have a healthy deposit in the link bank account.

So how to do you get more links? This email from a friend contains some pretty nifty ideas for link mining:

Become an Authority

1. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It’s an accessibility thing.)

2. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

3. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

Use PPC Strategies

4. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News Syndication

5. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

6. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

7. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

8. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

9. Trade articles with other webmasters.

10. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

11. Write about, and link to, companies with “in the news” pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

12. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.