One of the best ways (if not the best) to get your site listed on the first page of the search engines is to increase link popularity for it. But buying links or using automated "link management" services is no longer effective as the search engines have "wised up" to a lot of these systems and practises. This technique no gives you the ability to dominate the first page of the search engines with relative ease. And it works like gangbusters.

The 3 major search engines place a lot of importance on the number of incoming links to your site, but they also now how to spot if your link building campaign is natural or automated - and if they suspect for 1 second that it may be automated, all those links will count for nothing as the search engines will simply discard them.

The key aspect to focus on when getting backlinks to your site is to make it look as natural as possible - by that I mean don't get lots of links in the first week, then nothing in the following weeks. That's like waving a big red flag at the search engines saying "this site's using automated link building systems - please ignore all incoming links".

In a series of 4 articles, this being part 1, I'm going to explain the exact approach and techniques I use to gain an ever increasing number of natural links to my site, with virtually no effort at all, and with no outsourcing costs involved.

These 4 link building techniques are:

A new twist on how to increase link popularity with articles. Submitting your site to high PR web directories. A very powerful and highly effective approach to automated natural link growth. How the new "blogging for backlinks" works.

In part I of this article I'm going to cover some powerful techniques for increasing link popularity with articles. Now before you think you've heard all this before, hear me out as I'm pretty sure you haven't come across this system before.

There's 2 parts to my article marketing strategy - part 1 is where I submit unique articles to the top article directories (see the list below). Part 2 is where I use a fairly new software application that will create unique (and humanly readable) versions of my article and submit them to over 600 different "second tier" article directories. Since I've been using it, this software has been responsible for some very lucrative first page listings for my web sites.

If you're familiar with article marketing, you're no doubt well aware of the benefits of submitting unique articles to directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. But here's a couple more you may not be aware of that are equally effective - if not more so:

Helium.com BigArticles.com PheedCentral.com EzineArticles.com ArticlesFactory.com SearchWarp.com GoArticles.com

All these sites will give you a high value and themed link back to you site, and an added bonus is that if your site is new, it will likely get indexed by the major search engines very quickly - usually within a day or so - or in some cases a few hours.

Part 2 of this technique is to use a fairly new semi-automated software application called Unique Article Wizard (see below for more details). This application will take a single article and submit it to over 600 separate and unique article directories.

UAW is unique in 2 ways - 1 is that it's the only application out there than do this, and 2 is well, I'll come #2 in a minute Unique Article Wizard will submit a unique version of your article to each of over 600 different article directories, all of which are indexed and ranked by Google (and MSN and Yahoo). That means you'll get over 600 additional backlinks to your site with one simple action, and if your site is brand new, it will get indexed by the search engines in lightening speed - sometimes in a matter of hours.

The second real benefit of UAW is that each article it submits to all these article directories will be unique. The system has a very neat twist that means it will literally create hundreds of unique versions of your article automatically - and it won't be gobble-de-gook or machine generated garbage that no could or would ever want to read.

If you know about the duplicate content penalties from search engines you'll appreciate just how powerful this feature is. If you're new to duplicate content issues, no problem - just know that this system is protecting all your articles being dumped as duplicate content.

Parts 2, 3 and 4 of this series will be out soon so watch out for them. Alternatively, to make sure you get immediate notification when they are published, sign up for my free newsletter at Octocat.com where I also share tips and techniques I use in my affiliate marketing business every day.