Today we collect ten of the most original ideas for building links on the net. You may not be able to integrate all of them into your SEO campaign, but even a couple will give your link popularity score a lot of momentum.

1 . Offer free samples of your product in exchange for reviews
If you have a truly awesome product or service, this will get you a lot of love in the web community. Offer people free samples of your product or service (if appropriate), and ask them to leave a review on a site of your choice. Some might not bother – but plenty will. Choose a site that follows its review links for best search engine optimisation effect!

2 . Create ‘real’ relationships that could turn into linking relationships
Go to industry conferences and mingle with the people you’d like to get links from. You’ll be much more memorable and linkable if you meet them in person, instead of just as an email signature.

3 . Become a sponsor
A way to feel good about getting links! If you donate to a school, you may be able to get some authority .edu links to really bolster your SEO long-term.

4 . Buy an old authority site
Google likes older domains better – buy a site that already has a good link profile, and start building links on it to your site as an SEO side project.

5 . Make sure you are W3C complaint
Government sites are more likely to link to standards compliant sites, and you can also get a link from the directories of W3C compliant websites.

6 . Leave testimonials
When your business finds a great product, send a testimonial off to the site owner. Ask if they’d mind linking to you, if they end up using it on the site. For best SEO effect, choose a website that doesn’t already have an enormous testimonial list.

7 . Make people feel important
One survey by a salary-oriented site looked at how underpaid mothers were, and gained a veritable flood of links from across the web! In SEO, you definitely catch more flies with honey.

8 . Put photos on your site
Sites that have pictures of the owners often seem more trustworthy, people are more inclined to link to them, and your search engine optimisation strategy benefits. Personally, I prefer the author photographs that aren’t too polished and perfect, but show people in a ‘real’ light.

9 . Interview somebody
People LOVE to read interviews … and they love to link to interviews from their pages, because they are information ‘straight from the horse’s
mouth’. For the time they take to do, interviews are great SEO value.

10 .Offer tools in your industry
Many mortgage brokers offer their own mortgage calculators. Finance oriented sites offer their own currency converters. Check out Apple’s list of Dashboard widgets for inspiration for an idea you could have built for your own SEO campaign.