What is Organic Link Building?

One of the easiest ways to get backlinks to your website or blog is to build organic incoming links to the site. Each organic link is a vote for your site without you doing any work other than providing great content and keeping it up to date.
In this article we will cover:

• What is an Organic Link?
• Advantages of Organic Links
• How to Get Organic Links

What is an Organic Link?

An organic link is a link from someone else’s website, blog or social account where they linked to your site without being asked to. You had nothing to do with this other than provide great content that they felt was worth sharing with their readers and/or followers.
As people find your articles or website pages they will link to a specific page within your website or blog. These links can be within the content of the article or listed as a reference at the end of the article. They are a great way to drive targeted visitors to your site because the person that linked to you has vouched for your article or page.

Links Are the Currency of the Internet
I couldn’t figure out who first said that, but it is absolutely true. No one will give you links without you earning them. To earn them, you’ll need to do something remarkable. When you receive inbound links, it’s like getting paid. This may be literal if you have ads or products, but even if not, you are being rewarded with new readers…

Chris Guillebeau
Page 68 279 Days to Overnight Success

Advantages of Organic Links

The advantages of organic links are:

• They drive targeted traffic to your site.
• The search engine bots follow the links they find on other sites and consider a link from a related site a good vote for you site.
• Great way to get known in your field/niche.
• The more organic links you get from trusted sites related to your niche the better. Over time you will be in the ranks of trusted sites too.

How to Get Organic Links

There are lots of ways to earn an organic link:

• Provide Great Content

  You are probably thinking the “provide great content” answer is just a suggest coming from a broken record. Well it is not. The way Web Page Mistakes (and other sites we own) has built backlinks is by providing quality content that our targeted audience likes to read. Our articles are linked to from educational sites like University of Minnesota Duluth’s Web Design References based on the content we provide.
  This can work for you also in your chosen niche. Become the “Go To” resource in your niche and you too will start get links from respected sites without asking.
  

• Participating in Related Communities

  Participating in communities related to your niche or where your target audience are to be found is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. This doesn’t mean you go in there and start self promoting and link dropping though. Be a part of the community first. Provide solutions to posted problems. Start interesting conversations. Post related resources you thought the community would be interested in.
  

• Make it Easy to Link to You

  Provide a link to me page complete with the coding people are to put into their pages when linking to your site.
  Now that we have social media, provide social networking icons to make it easy for people to quickly post a link to your article on their favourite social networking or social bookmarking site.
  

• Provide Instructional Articles

  Demonstrate your expertise by providing How To or tutorial articles for your product (if you sell one), your service (again if you sell one) or a general instructional article than your niche would be interested in. Why to you think when you search for something like Photoshop tutorials there are so many? Because it works.
  

• Write About Something Newsworthy in Your Industry

  Some new tax come in that affects your industry? Write about it. Cover the controversial side if no one else has. Or do the opposite, find the good points about the issue if everyone is writing about the negatives.
  

• Provide Not So Well Known Facts

  Do some research on little known facts about your industry. Provide your research results on your site. This is how some people have established themselves as experts in their industry. Dan Zarrella is one person that comes to mind. He started analyzing social media and social media strategies and has now earned the respect of many as a social media researcher.
  

• List Posts/Articles

  List posts on blogs or list articles are always popular. Lists of related resources or tools that you have tried complete with your review work too. Don’t be afraid to link out to these. It is how you become the “Go To” resource in your field. Plus it will get you noticed by the resource and could snowball into an organic link back.
  

• Get a Blog

  If you have not created a blog yet, you should. Sharing information on your blog is another way to build your expertice in your field. Include a RSS feed with your blog. This way your readers can subscribe to your blog and be notified of your new content. Also, some social networking sites let you connect with your blog and post updates to your profile.
  

• Provide a Useful Product or Service

  Develop a useful product or service for your niche in the industry. Something new and exciting.
  

• Videos

  Create videos and make the available on your site or blog. People love videos right now and good ones spread like wildfire via the social networking sites and via email.
  

There are all kinds of ways to work on your organic link building. You just have to provide great stuff and present it uniquely.
GoogleWebMasterHelp has a video done by Matt Cutts: What are some effective techniques for building links? you should watch to learn more effective ways to build organic links. Matt also talks about organic links in this video: Is there such a thing as building too many links?