SEO

Back Link Building Method

SEO - Link Building Series: Backlink Building Methods
Feb.24, 2009 in Site Promotion, SEO
Posted by Ajith Prasad Edassery
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A couple of posts ago, we saw how internal linking and optimization can be done within your blog or website in order to improve reach and thereby help Search Engine (SE) bots to crawl and link relevant pages. Now, it’s time to learn about various link building techniques in order to obtain a lot of backlinks to your blog (This topic could be boring to those who have read it 100 times elsewhere). As we understood sometime back, no ‘nofollow’ backlinks with relevant keywords in the anchor text will boost the search engine rankings of your pages.
Ways to build your Backlinks
#1 Blogroll & Link exchanges: This is the most common way of building links whereby on mutual consent the links are exchanged using the blog roll space. This is also less spammy in nature and sometimes will do the role of advertising for your blog.
#2 Link love: This is not exactly my way of link building but there are a lot of people who give and take love with no nofollow references to each others’ posts. If you link to and from relevant posts, it is actually beneficial to both the parties. There are people who regularly publish link love posts.
#3 Directory submission: You can submit your blog URL to directory services some of which provide dofollow listing. In most cases, relevant front page listings come at a cost.
#4 Blog commenting: Blog commenting on dofollow blogs is a great way to improve your inbound links. In addition, if the blog supports a top commentator, commentluv, keywordluv plugins, it can improve your chances of getting dofollow links from more relevant sources.
#5 Forum posting: Many forums these days provide dofollow links via post signatures of signed up users. Though the link strength of forum backlinks are relatively weak, a number of them will always be of help. Please read my article titled High PR forums to help popularize your blog for more information on this method of building backlinks.
#6 Guest posting: Guest posting on popular blogs will not only build one or two relevant links to your blog but also attract some traffic, get some subscriptions and conversions.
#7 Via services such as blog themes, widgets and badges: If you build and market your own free themes and widgets, you will have a chance to put backlinks on those free products (e.g. Free WordPress themes, blog rank widgets etc)
#8 Link baiting: Link baiting refers to the process of publishing some content/post so exciting, unique and compelling that people willingly would link to such content. The baits could be something like plugins, free online services, free tool downloads etc.
#9 Paid links: Paid links or buying links are another way to improve your backlinks but these come at the risk of being detected and blacklisted by search engines such as Google. Google believes that such unethical ways of link building inorder to boost page ranks are methods to sabotage their logic of identifying the relevant links.
#10 Article submission and spinning: Another way of building links is article marketing and/or spinning. This method is explained in detail in one of my posts on article submission sites
Other tips for effective link building
Whenever you bump into a blog in your niche with similar ranks and statistics, make it a point to contact its author via contact forms for potential link exchange queries and/or blogroll entries
Three-way linking (a => b, b=> c, c => a) is supposed to be better than reciprocal linking (a => b, b => a)
Keep track of the URLs or blogs with which you have exchanged links (especially in three way linking). You may loose track otherwise
Make sure that your link partners use dofollow links if they promised to do so
It is always beneficial to exchange links with pages that have a low number of outbound links. This minimizes page rank dilution
Use the NoDoFollow Firefox add-on to check the rel properties of links
You can use free tools like comment kahuna commenting software to search and comment on blogs of your niche and/or have specific keywords in them
Read the comment policy of blogs where you are commenting to save you from the risk of getting marked as spam. Also gently ask the bloggers whether keywords in URL are okay (some of them don’t allow this)
Gradual and slow link building is always better than high speed link-building (such as article spinning or purchasing links in bulk)
Stay away from bad neighbourhood (rated sites, copyright violations, pirated content etc) while exchanging links as blanket bans by Google can put your online life int jeopardy
I hope that I have covered almost all known methods of link building in this post. One of our online buddies has recently started a bigger post on the same topic. You might want to check out his comprehensive guide on building backlinks as well.
Part VIII: Keyword Optimization for Long Term benefits >>
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A couple of posts ago, we saw how internal linking and optimization can be done within your blog or website in order to improve reach and thereby help Search Engine (SE) bots to crawl and link relevant pages. Now, it’s time to learn about various link building techniques in order to obtain a lot of backlinks to your blog (This topic could be boring to those who have read it 100 times elsewhere). As we understood sometime back, no ‘nofollow’ backlinks with relevant keywords in the anchor text will boost the search engine rankings of your pages.
Ways to build your Backlinks
#1 Blogroll & Link exchanges: This is the most common way of building links whereby on mutual consent the links are exchanged using the blog roll space. This is also less spammy in nature and sometimes will do the role of advertising for your blog.
#2 Link love: This is not exactly my way of link building but there are a lot of people who give and take love with no nofollow references to each others’ posts. If you link to and from relevant posts, it is actually beneficial to both the parties. There are people who regularly publish link love posts.
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#3 Directory submission: You can submit your blog URL to directory services some of which provide dofollow listing. In most cases, relevant front page listings come at a cost.
#4 Blog commenting: Blog commenting on dofollow blogs is a great way to improve your inbound links. In addition, if the blog supports a top commentator, commentluv, keywordluv plugins, it can improve your chances of getting dofollow links from more relevant sources.
#5 Forum posting: Many forums these days provide dofollow links via post signatures of signed up users. Though the link strength of forum backlinks are relatively weak, a number of them will always be of help. Please read my article titled High PR forums to help popularize your blog for more information on this method of building backlinks.
#6 Guest posting: Guest posting on popular blogs will not only build one or two relevant links to your blog but also attract some traffic, get some subscriptions and conversions.
#7 Via services such as blog themes, widgets and badges: If you build and market your own free themes and widgets, you will have a chance to put backlinks on those free products (e.g. Free WordPress themes, blog rank widgets etc)
#8 Link baiting: Link baiting refers to the process of publishing some content/post so exciting, unique and compelling that people willingly would link to such content. The baits could be something like plugins, free online services, free tool downloads etc.
#9 Paid links: Paid links or buying links are another way to improve your backlinks but these come at the risk of being detected and blacklisted by search engines such as Google. Google believes that such unethical ways of link building inorder to boost page ranks are methods to sabotage their logic of identifying the relevant links.
#10 Article submission and spinning: Another way of building links is article marketing and/or spinning. This method is explained in detail in one of my posts on article submission sites
Other tips for effective link building
Whenever you bump into a blog in your niche with similar ranks and statistics, make it a point to contact its author via contact forms for potential link exchange queries and/or blogroll entries
Three-way linking (a => b, b=> c, c => a) is supposed to be better than reciprocal linking (a => b, b => a)
Keep track of the URLs or blogs with which you have exchanged links (especially in three way linking). You may loose track otherwise
Make sure that your link partners use dofollow links if they promised to do so
It is always beneficial to exchange links with pages that have a low number of outbound links. This minimizes page rank dilution
Use the NoDoFollow Firefox add-on to check the rel properties of links
You can use free tools like comment kahuna commenting software to search and comment on blogs of your niche and/or have specific keywords in them
Read the comment policy of blogs where you are commenting to save you from the risk of getting marked as spam. Also gently ask the bloggers whether keywords in URL are okay (some of them don’t allow this)
Gradual and slow link building is always better than high speed link-building (such as article spinning or purchasing links in bulk)
Stay away from bad neighbourhood (rated sites, copyright violations, pirated content etc) while exchanging links as blanket bans by Google can put your online life int jeopardy
I hope that I have covered almost all known methods of link building in this post. One of our online buddies has recently started a bigger post on the same topic. You might want to check out his comprehensive guide on building backlinks as well.
Part VIII: Keyword Optimization for Long Term benefits >>

Back Link Building Method

10 Free Super Simple Back Links Tips

Thu 24 May 2007
10 Free Super Simple Back-Link Building Tips Blurb by Shaun Anderson
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After reading a thread in a forum with some frankly crap link building advice I thought I’d give it my ten bob.
Don’t get a link from “links” pages on sites as these are about 1% as useful as your signature link on the 7th page of a forum thread, unless of course the Page is a PR 9 with a lot of back-links itself
If a site wants to link to you from a page with 100 links on it you can basically forget it as the strength of the link is shared by, well, 100 others!
So if you have a site about Dogs you might want to link out to Crufts or the Kennel Club or Wiki a good one. Naturally, you should also get relevant sites to link to you. If you have a costume website, find a costume website you can add your url to for free.
You need to get into the good neighbourhoods. Try and get links from the neighbourhoods at the top of Google for your key phrases after all Google likes these sites enough to rank them! Find that circle of sites where all the big boys in your industry link to and are linked from and get involved. For instance, try and get a link from a .gov site!
See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well (or pay money to have their link replaced with yours
Use Yahoo and type “link:yourcompetitors.com” and see who links to them. Yahoo is kind enough to rank pages virtually by the number of back-links sites have in site explorer - making it one of my most used seo tools.
Don’t waste your time with seo tools! Join Social Network tools like Delicious, Technorati and Stumble. There’s three links right there, although to be fair, they are not actually counted as linksby Google becasue of the Nofollow attribute. Digg links count, though.
A link is a link. If someone, anyone wants to link to you accept, just don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them (negates the value of the link, almost) and could see your site lose trust. Remember Google says it is impossible for a site to hurt your site by simply linking to your site, but you can hurt your site if you link to another site with a ’shady’ backlink profile.
It doesn’t hurt to get a link from a low or high Google Page Rank page. Today’s No-PR page might be a PR 5 page in reality, as Google Toolbar is out of date.
Good Google rankings is not all about who you get a link from it’s who you link to - this is thought to be the measure of the trust of a site and seems fairly reasonable to me. Link to authority sites in your industry as well as other sites that look like quality upcoming sites, and stay clear of suspect sites.
Obviously I assume you have a blog with original content on it! And remember it’s quality of links not quantity. What, you want a bonus one as is normal blog etiquette?
Sod it - I can’t be bothered.

10 Free Super Simple Back Links Tips

75+ Link Building Techniques

Below, I’ve compiled a list of techniques I personally know of being utilized in the industry. It is by no means comprehensive, but is one of the most complete lists I’m aware of. I’ve tried to keep each technique as mutually exclusive as possible.
I would like this list to become definitive, so I propose this;if you can provide 5 techniques not already covered (at the sole discretion of SEP), we will:a. incorporate your ideas, and give you proper attribution for all to seeb. send you a $50 gift certificate
and … the person who submits the most new link building techniques by February 1st 2009, that ultimately get incorporated into this document (again, at the sole discretion of SEP), will be awarded $250.
Some of the techniques mentioned in this document are not condoned by SEP or the search engines, but are listed only to add to the comprehensiveness of the document. Only you know your own risk tolerance, and so must make the decision regarding tactics yourself.
Each of the techniques below, assumes a basic knowledge of the use of NoFollow tag, robots.txt exclusions, and the identification of bad neighbourhoods.
The Definitive List of Link Building Techniques:
1. build useful tools, that others will talk about and link to. These may be WordPress plugins (eg. a 301 Redirect Plugin for Wordpress), Firefox extensions (eg. Dave Naylor’s multi-browser SEO Tool, and 97th Floor’s Social Media Plugin), and the like
2. build fun or helpful widgets relevant to your business or industry (ie. mortgage calculators, body mass index calculators, how much is my blog worth, etc.).
3. offer badges
4. offer awards
5. issue online press releases
6. build definitive lists or resources via your blog eg. 75+ Link Building Techniques of 2008
7. write and release an ebook eg. How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes by Matt McGee, The SEO Handbook - 2008 by Dave Harry.
8. reciprocal linking with suppliers, clients, and complementary businesses
9. hold a contest. Sometimes even the smallest of contests can result in large numbers of links
10. guest blog on relevant sites in your industry
Image courtesy SEOResearcher.com
11. submit to quality directories
12. submit your blog postings to search engine friendly social media
13. sponsor an event, or a cause
14. provide testimonials for industry products you use
15. vanity bait others - in your blog, include positive mentions of the blog posts of others, and link freely to their work. Often, they’ll feel compelled to acknowledge you
16. comment on the blogs of others in your industry, or those of related sites.
17. send samples of your product to industry bloggers and ask them to try the products. If they like them, they may write about them. Of course the risk is, if they don’t like them, they may write about them too.
18. participate in surveys or group projects.
19. write “how to” guides or posts
20. release unique research results
21. be the first to uncover and blog about a significant news story
22. post job postings in colleges and universities
23. offer to speak at a college or university
24. help write curriculum for a college or university
25. provide a bursury or endowment to the school
26. make a financial contribution to your college or university. Often this results in a dofollow link acknowledging the contribution.
27. study your local government site to look for opportunities to get listed (ie. news, directory, etc.)
28. use ppc to drive qualified searchers to your quality content, knowing a % will link.
29. syndicate articles
30. trade articles with other webmasters
31. search for sites with dofollow ‘trackbacks’ and link to some of their blog posts.
32. carefully select your friends on social media (eg. Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious). If they work for media (eg. newspapers, magazines, radio stations, etc.) cater the content to their apparent interests. I’ve had content mentioned on radio shows before (and linked to from the radio’s website), merely by knowing to put a ‘conspiracy’ spin on the science content.
33. internal links are crucial and important. Ensure you use proper navigation structure
34. submit to nofollow social media too, if the content is really good. If it goes hot, it will be seen by large numbers of people potentially, and will typically result in a number of good links.
35. study competitors banklinks via Yahoo Site Explorer, and request backlinks from many of the same sources
36. maintain profiles on RELEVANT social media sites with DoFollow profile pages, and heavily link those pages with other pages from the social media site (ie. lots of friends, lots of activity).
37. buy another domain with links pointing to it, and 301 redirect it
38. always carry a camera, capture interesting photos, and post them to the site and Flickr using Creative Commons licensing (requiring links back to your site).
39. include links in the footers of your RSS, so content scaped from your site contains links back to you.
40. rent some links from companies like Text Link Brokers. Be careful though. Google will penalize both the selling and buying party for paid links.
41. strike a deal to purchase a text link ad on relevant pages of a related site. Best if the link is from within a site’s actual content.
42. offer to make a contribution to charities
43. as Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans have suggested from their post 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website (points 62 and 63), sue a large company (get the David vs Goliath element working in your favour) or get sued by a company that people hate. Genius!
44. interview industry personalities, and post video and text versions to your blog. Others are always interested in what they have to say, and often will find reason to link to something they’ve said.
45. speak at industry events, especially if you know they offer dofollow profiles and linkbacks for such speakers.
46. apply for awards. Even if these sites do not link back to your site, news of winning awards can often be good linkable content for local media.
47. join a number of local organizations such as the local Board of Trade. Often, these sites provide dofollow member directory links.
48. offer a discount or free product samples to others who blog about your product.
49. submit your blog to RSS feed directories
50. do something remarkable such as running a marathon or triathlon
51. do something controversial, or to infuriate the industry (eg. say SEO is dying to a group of SEOs … good one Jason Calcanis, ShoeMoney). Most will link to you, not knowing they’re helping to further promote the issue
52. create niche sites for specific segments of topics of your industry, and link back to your site
53. create an industry group or panel, complete with its own website. Often competitors will not link directly to you, but they will link to sites that link to you!
54. find pages that link to you that are not in the indexes of search engines, and are not noindexed or blocked by robots.txt, and link to those pages so spiders will follow them and find the links pointing back to your site.
55. buy sponsored reviews
56. there are a number of wiki types sites on the internet, that will provide link backs if you add good quality content to their sites.
57. start a search engine friendly affiliate program
58. provide answers via some ‘Answers’ type sites, and link to your content on the matter as proof of your answer
59. provide a link (from a specific content piece) to a particular site that you wish to receive a link from, and send them large volumes of traffic. Often, this will be enough to capture their attention, and link back to your post on the subject.
60. attend related conferences and network, network, network. People are camera crazy these days, and will post pictures of most of the people the meet, often complete with links back to your site.
61. develop relationships with local media personalities, such that you are their ‘Goto’ person when they need information on a given subject.
62. some sites have a “See Us In The Press” page. When you find such sites relating to your industry, write something about them. Often, they’ll pick it up and post it to their site … everyone like to show off their cudos.
63. forum commenting
64. search keyword “add url”, keyword “add site”, and add your site to those sites
65. be a ‘top commentator’ on search engine friendly blogs offering the plugin
66. submit videos to tv channel websites (thank you for this idea Melanie Nathan) and be sure to include relevant text links.
67. point out errors (spelling, grammatical, coding) on sites where you’d like a link from. Often, thanks is provided in the form of a link.
68. develop a WordPress plugin that automatically generates links back to the author’s site from the blog where the plugin is ‘plugged in’ (this is extremely black hat!!!)
69. list yourself with the BBB (Better Business Bureau) and other local organizations. It should be noted however, that not all BBB sites offer DoFollow links
70. submit the widgets you create to widget directories
71. create customized WordPress themes, complete with properly worded attribution links
72. search for articles, sites, or posts that mention your personal or business name, though do not link to it, and then contact them and ask them to link to your site. This is courtesy of Wiep
73. if your company owns numerous web sites, have the other websites interlink. Again courtesy of Wiep
74. find companies offering the same products or services, except in different countries, regions, or even languages, and approach them to exchange links (Wiep … you’re on a roll)
75. create an industry niche directory, and link back to your site
76. hold a blog carnival (courtesy Kari Rippetoe)
77. create profiles on Slideshare and Slideboom and upload your PPT presentations. Add your website link to your profiles.(courtesy Kari Rippetoe)
78. purchase links, but disguise them as AdSense or Affiliate Banners … courtesy Gab Goldenberg @ Link Building.ca
79. buy paid links to promote linkbait pieces … courtesy Slightly Shady SEO, and Gab Goldenberg @ Link Building.ca for bringing my attention to it.
80. create geocities, tripod and aol memberpages accounts so you can give yourself guestbook links … courtesy Gab Goldenberg @ Link Building.ca
81. hunt for dying blogspot sites registered through hotmail addresses, then see about getting the hotmail addresses and taking over the blogs … courtesy Oilman and Gab Goldenberg @ Link Building.ca for bringing my attention to it.
82. Use a hub-finder to find the best links, based on them supporting 2+ competitors’ rankings … courtesy Gab Goldenberg @ Link Building.ca
83. Use keyword combination (e.g. keyword listbuilding) tools to combine the various forms of “add url” or related footprints … courtesy Gab Goldenberg @ Link Building.ca
Please Note: many of these techniques are not condoned by Search Engine People Inc., though have been included in the interest of comprehensiveness.
ps apologies Wiep … this list was already well under way when you posted yours. Besides, I think we’ve touched on some different aspects.

75+ Link Building Techniques

10 Backlink Techniqes

1. Quantity or Quality Better?
Quality links are better of course. I stumbled upon this by accident when I set up my new blog last year and I had the intuition to focus solely on authority sites comprising of only .edu sites and at least PR4 blogs and ensured relevancy using my BlogComment Demon software to locate them. Because the next PR update then was December/January, I had only about 6 weeks to obtain these back links. I didn’t get that many, just about 30 but they were of very high quality and high PR links. The result of my accidental experiment: My Blog pagerank moved from PR0 to PR2. Lots of people have argued that pagerank is not important and their business and income have not suffered with a lower rank. But for the purpose of back link building you will soon see that pagerank does matter and is one of the key ingredients to help you rank well in search engines.
But hypothetically, what if you had 20000 PR0 links? Would you outrank someone who has say 500 quality links? Nobody really knows Google’s back link algorithm to be able to answer this question. But my guess is that in this example, quantity could outrank the quality back links but with a proviso that the 20000 PR0 links had been obtained legitimately and over a reasonable period of time. I like to think that the average marketer would not be able to get such quantity if he is just starting out in his Legitimate Home Internet Business.
2.Anchor Text Variations
Why is anchor text variation so important? You can easily find the answer in this statement “Google likes your links natural”. I would say the best way for back links to look natural is having a variation of keyword anchor text. This was discussed in my earlier post How Keywords Can Get You Top Search Engine Rankings-Part 2 which tells you it’s important to keep your main keyword but have other keyword anchor variations as well. This post also spells out what is the most ideal mix of the number of primary keywords and secondary keywords in your page. I really can’t overemphasize the danger of adopting a ‘one keyword’ linking technique. It may just give Google the impression that you are a spammer and it’s going to hurt your rankings.. Think of it this way. If it were that easy, all you had to do to rank well was do directory maximizer submissions for your main keyword all day long. Now won’t this make everyone else getting the number 1 position in their Legitimate Home Internet Business too?
3. Cross Linking Among Pages - Linking Internally Is Important
To understand the importance of cross linking in pages, you shoud learn a little about orphan pages and supplemental index by Google. An orphan page is one which is not linked to another page and therefore it cannot be found by spiders. The solution: Check regularly that all your pages of your site are linked to one another. If this is not done, there is a good chance they won’t be indexed by the search engines as they are deemed irrelevant for searches. As a result, you would not expect any of such orphan pages to be ranked at all.
Supplemental Results were introduced by Google in 2003 and without going into details, refer to an index like a filter putting pages with low page ranks in the same place. Pages with few or no back links and orphan pages fall under this category of supplemental indexing. While we understand that Google has improved the search results for such pages over the years, it was a known fact that there was often a 3-month lag time when indexing spiders visited such pages in the early years. The solution: Have all your inside pages linked to each other. My very first post on Link Building Strategy-Deep Links-Part 1 discussed this in more details and you should read it to understand what I mean. There’s another point I wish to add and that is deep linking is often used as a strategy to get double listed in search engines. What this means is that you would have two chances to pull a searcher in from the SERP.
4. Get People To Link To Your Anchor Text
If you have been following my Link Strategy Series posts, this has been discussed in my Review My Blog-Get Free Linkback post. Additionally, I like to point out that the search engines determine the relevancy of the topic in which the link appears on the page. So ‘Review My Blog’ and even sponsored reviews (e.g. SponsoredReviews.com, ReviewMe.com) are very focused on your product or service so the page is extremely relevant.
5. Do Not Totally Ignore Outbound Links
Most people just overreacted when they learned that they should get more inbounds than outbounds. As a result they often refrained completely from including a single outbound link in their pages. That it is perfectly fine to do so and in fact helps in getting your page ranked has been proven in my post Link Building Strategy-Deep Links-Part 1 in which I had provided my page results for discussion. Do link out to sites that share relevant information but remember to have more inbound links than outbound links.
6. Links Embedded in Page Content are Very Powerful
Links found within the page content of your Internet Home Business are of more value to you than if it is found elsewhere like at the blog comment section. In fact when it is blog comment, you are subject to any “no-follow’ restriction from the blog as well. An embedded link found in the page content is recognized as more natural and search engines have created their algorithms to give more weight to such links, primarily because this is viewed as something useful to the reader doing a search.
7. Post to “Do-Follow” Blogs
When doing blog commenting, minimize posting to “no-follow” blogs. On a SEO perspective, it is quite useless to spend your efforts posting to such blogs as you won’t get any back links. These blogs show a “no-follow” in the “a href” attribute of the link. The objective of this no-follow tag was to alert the Search Engine on possible SPAM and for blog owners offer some form of control for SPAM comments as well.
Here are a couple of lists of do follow blogs that you can use:a. 200+ Blogs @ CourtneyTuttle.com - newest entries listed on topb. David Leonhardt’s Do-follow Blogs - updated list, started May 10, 2008
8. Link Also To Pages Not Just Your Homepage
When you do blog commenting, focus more on getting high quality relevant back links pointing to your inside pages as well, not just your homepage. This is extremely good for Search Engine and no secret as Google has documented it and I’ve discussed this topic too in my recent Link Strategy posts. Read all about this in my:Link Building Strategy-Deep Links-Part 1
9. Online Directory Webmasters:
Sign up and use 3rd party link exchanges (e.g. linkmarket, linkmetro) only if you have the extra time to spare. Personally I think some of these sites work well, but only when you are willing to exchange links with all the sites regardless of pagerank and relevance. If you are looking for just good relevant PR sites, you ought to give this a miss. The reason being that you’ll spend most of your time denying these exchanges.
10. Buying Manually Added Quality Backlinks
I am leaving this last mainly because this subject usually raises some controversy. I have not done so myself but I’ve had conversations with at least one SEO specialist who advocates this as a good link building technique for your Internet Home Business and even included it in his SEO checklist to buy cheap links from eBay every month for his 17 websites. Well that’s food for thought for the moment and we can hold this off till another post, definitely before we become SEO Specialists.