Besides going out and acquiring links through link buying, link baiting and link trading, there are other techniques that work well.
What are Wikis?
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. This online resource allows users to add and edit content collectively. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
The most well-known wiki is wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is an authority site that many refer to and it is a PageRank 8 homepage as of this writing. The most common usage of Wiki’s is as an encyclopedia. Registered users may edit and add information to the main topic pages.
Some other wiki projects:
twiki.org
phpwiki.sourceforge.net
www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki
en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page
wikitravel.org
en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
pbwiki.com
en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Main_Page
How to Build Links in Wikis
You can search for wikis related to your industry. Let’s say your business is web design, you can search in Google for “web design” inurl:wiki and it will return 194,000 results. Sift through the sites and find the ones which will work and build a list of the top 50-100 wiki sites that you can use to build links. In a short period of time, you’ll have gained at least 20-50 new links from these highly relevant sites. Repeat the search using similar phrases to see if other new wikis pop up.
If your site is an industry authority site and warrants a listing in the main article entry, you can get a powerful link that many people will refer to. There is, however, another part of Wiki’s that can be utilized – user profile pages and talk pages. These get indexed and old talk pages get archived and remain indexed.
Since wikis employ open-editing, it is wise to be careful about what is being added to main topic pages. You’ll want to narrow your editing to the most relevant in your category. Select the top 3-5 pages with highest link-popularity and PageRank. Before going straight to the main article page and editing it to add any links, however, test out how your peers perceive the site in the talk pages. Only if response is excellent, then go ahead and edit the main resource page. Otherwise, you risk being labelled a link spammer on closely monitored pages. Always ensure the external site you link to in the wiki is complementary and adds real value for visitors. This gives the link a higher probability of staying.
You can also apply the Wiki concept to other sites by approaching others to help other webmasters build out a valuable resource for their visitors. This is a great way to gain some authority links from relevant sites. To do so, find out the following:
Once you’ve answered those questions successfully, create the resource and request the link from them. While this process takes some real work, it can be worthwhile since the result will be lots of linkbacks from many high quality sites.