Paid links was once a popular way of getting a website a better listing on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These search engines work by evaluating how many times a particular web page is linked to. The ones who are linked to the most will get a better page rating on their search engines. For this reason, a lot of people began trying to figure out ways to get their sites listed across the world wide web. Paid links became one of the popular ways to go about doing this.

In short, these days there is no paid links alternative in the SEO game - at least not anymore these days. That is because Google and other major search engines have made it a policy that paid links are a bad thing. If you are caught displaying paid links on your website, then you can get in to serious trouble. Your PageRank may be severely demoted, or deleted altogether, depending on the whims of Google.

In a way, this is a good thing, as paid links was never really a worthwhile SEO plan to begin with. It made websites look cramped and ugly - you would have a million pointless links that had nothing to do with the content of the website you were looking at. As the world wide web is meant first and foremost to promote the idea of a virtual community, it is much better to have links on a web site that have to do directly with the content of that site. Otherwise, you just get a lot of junk clouding the world wide web, effectively diminishing the experience of surfing in cyber space.

The best way to get people to link to your site is to have premium content on your site. That should attract a lot of attention as is. Once you have your site up, if you want to expedite the process of getting people to link to your site, you can send out e-mails to likeminded web sites offering to a do a link exchange. Chances are, web sites that are similar to yours in interest will also be interested in getting as many sites to link to them as possible and will accept your offer. Not only is this a better way to get people to link to your site - it is more economical as well.