Once you have gone through the extensive work of planning, developing, and designing your website for your new online venture you must get it listed and indexed in the major search engines to be found by the targeted visitors that you need.
First you must have a quality website with good content and search engine friendly pages that are easy for the search engines to spider and index. Then to be found you will need to have inbound links pointing to your website url. By inbound links we mean links from other websites that point to your website url home page or inner pages.

Now you should make sure that you have quality related inbound links pointing to your website. Quality links should be direct hyper links to your site, not JavaScript redirects or any type of link that does not directly point to your site. Also the title of your link should be either your website title or the keywords you are targeting to help you in the search engines. Remember – if the links pointing to your site are not direct links that the search engines or visitors can follow, then they do your website no good what so ever.

So, now what to look for and what to avoid when searching for inbound links for your website. First and foremost avoid link farm sites, which are useless pages with 50+ links per page of unrelated sites. These type links do your site no good, and if you link to them from your site, they may do your site harm.
What does best for your website is related links, which are links from sites that have a similar theme as your website. You can find and acquire these types of inbound links for your site in several different ways.

1. First you may search for other websites that are related in theme to yours. For instance if your website is dealing with pet food then you would look for any websites relating to pets or pet supplies and then see about getting a link on their site pointing to your site. Many websites offer link exchange where you would place a link to their site from your site and they would place a link to your site from their site. This system is good if both sites give quality backlinks and by this of course not only means a direct link to your site but also from a page or directory that is linked to their website homepage. Before you start looking for inbound links to your site you need to decide if you are going to do link swaps, commonly known as reciprocal link exchanges.  If you wish to use this approach, then to be successful you will need to setup a links page/s or preferably a directory for adding other site’s links and have this linked off of your website home page with the title in the form of ‘Links’, ‘Resources’, or similar so that the links that you provide other sites can be found by your visitors and search engines. A good rule of thumb on this would be to try to provide sites the type of link that you would want them to provide you. No links on hidden pages or pages not even linked to your website, no redirects, etc. Just provide quality direct links at the least and if you want to be more professional in the approach and have more sites wanting to exchange links with you then consider a quality directory script. There are several free link directory scripts available that are very good such as phplinkdirectory or site-sift. Both are easy to setup and provide quality links.
Before you exchange links with any site, you should make sure that they can provide your site with a quality backlink. If their links page is not linked to their homepage then most likely it is never found by search engines or visitors so that type of link will be of no benefit to your site.

2. The easiest and quickest way to get high quality inbound links to your website is to search for quality web directories to submit your link to. You should look for first any niche directories that are in the same theme as your website and also all general directories that have a category that is related to your website. All directories offer various ways for you to submit your website link. Look at the directory carefully to make sure of the quality of the directory and link types to make sure they are direct links. Secondly read the submission information and guidelines carefully to understand how to submit your link, the options that they offer, and the rules for the types of sites that may be submitted.
Some directories will accept link exchange, that is usually described on the directory as reciprocal links. This can be a good option if it is available but be advised that you will need to supply a very high quality link back to the directory for your site to be accepted. If you have a links page of low quality such as just a bunch of links crammed on a page then most likely your website would not be accepted as a reciprocal link. The best option for many website owners is to submit their website as a paid review inclusion into the directory. Most all directories offer paid reviews with options such as a basic listing with your website title, url and description to featured listings that display above all others at a higher fee. Now back to the submission guidelines, make sure to read them all to see what is allowed and how to submit your site along with the options they offer and the fees. Also it is highly suggested to see the terms of the submission and make sure that if for any reason you site is rejected you will get your review fee refunded. All reputable directories will refund your fee if they do not accept your website.

In looking for directories to submit your website to you should also look at what features the site offers for your link and how they have setup their directory. There are numerous directories on the internet with more popping up every day. There are many directory owners that work full time on their directories to provide quality service and promotion for the websites that list with them and spend significant funds on designing and promoting their directory which in turn provides their customers with a high quality link. Some directories such as the International Business Directory have installed specialized mods that benefit websites such as deep links where websites may submit additional internal links to their site that will advertise and promote services and products that they provide. Other options are live rss feeds from the website and private online contact form for visitors to easily contact the website. Also provided on this directory and others like it, is a separate details page for your website link. This in effect gives a total private page for an additional link to your site.

So in summary, look for quality related sites to exchange links with and submit your website to as many quality directories in related categories as you can. Visit our International Business Directory to see how quality links should be and see some of the most advanced features and options that are available for website advertising. Feel free to submit your link if you like while you are there.
Follow these basic guidelines for acquiring quality inbound links for your website and shortly all the search engines will have indexed your website and you will be receiving targeted traffic that is looking for your products and or services.