When you have made a good website, you would naturally want a lot of traffic coming in. That is the key to online marketing.
There are 5 main ways to get inbound links to your Web site.

a) Links based on content

When you have quality content and lots of it, other Web sites will naturally link to your Web site. The quality of these links is better as they are in the main content of the page which gives better click through traffic, and the links are one way. These are the best kind of links to get but also take the most work to get.

b) Web directories

Directory links come in three different submission types. Paid, free, and free but requiring a link back (reciprocal link). Directory links are placed on pages with other links that are related. Some directories give more than one link. High traffic directories and directories that have lots of Web sites in each category are the best. Some SEO experts feel that one-way directory links in the lower quality directories are being devalued.
Some directories provide more than one link to your Web site. These links are called deep links as they link to pages other than the home page. Some times these extra directory links are right under the description of your submitted Web site and other times they are on their own page which has a link under the description.

The anchor text of these links should correspond to the topic of the content of these deep linked pages. In some cases the additional links have a higher review fee, but they are well worth it. These extra links bring the search engine spiders to your site more often and will help gets deeper pages crawled, they give you more click through traffic, and give higher ranking for the keywords in the anchor text.

 c) Reciprocal links

Reciprocal links are link trades and are two way links. Typically a number of pages with different subjects are created and relevant links from other Web sites are placed on those pages. Reciprocal link requests are then sent out to these placed sites. The links that don't give a link back are removed. More links are then placed and the process is repeated. Some SEO experts feel that two way links are devalued.

 d) Link rentals

Link rentals are links that are placed in the footer or one of the side columns of the Web page the link is placed on. You pay a monthly rental fee for these links. The value of these links used to be rated by their Pagerank (PR) value. With the search engine ranking weight of PR being devalued to the point where most SEO expects feel it has no ranking weight, link rentals are being valued by other qualities.

 e) Syndicated articles

Syndicated articles are articles you write and offer to other Web sites which publish them on the site. The Web sites that publish the articles give a link the author's Web site for the right to publish the article. These are one way links and the links are content links as they are usually at the bottom of the article. There are some issues with duplicate content where the pages can be dropped from the search engine index and while if that happens the links wouldn't help for ranking but will still provide click thought traffic.