Link Building Tips

Link building or the practise of buildings links is more commonly known as ‘Offpage’ SEO (search engine optimisation). To be absolutely sure you understand what I am talking about. A backlink is a link from another website pointing to you website. i.e. If I have a Facebook profile and put a link in my profile to my website that is a backlink.

Understand that link building is very, very important. You can spend a lot of time and effort creating the most perfect search engine friendly website but if you don’t have links pointing back to your site then you are going to have a hard time ranking well. If you decide to learn nothing else about SEO then, please at least take this away –

Link building or getting backlinks to your website is the very essence of SEO (search engine optimisation).

You must get backlinks in order to rank well on the search engines!

If you don’t believe me take Google’s word for it. In its webmaster guidelines, Google explicitly states that the position of where your website ranks is to some degree related to the quality and quantity of links that you have pointing back to your site. According to Google’s webmaster guidelines,

“Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity”

So you don’t need to pay an SEO ‘expert’ to tell you about how to get up the rankings because Google are already spelling it for you!

Think of links like votes. Search engines have to have some way of measuring the importance of a website. If they see lots of sites, especially high quality ones linking back to a website they assume that that website must be trustworthy. The more links that you have pointing back to your site, the more votes you have and the higher you will rank. Which political party wins the election? The one with the most votes (well usually, assuming a democratic country and even then that’s not guaranteed!). Therefore it is absolutely critical that you work on getting as many backlinks to your website as possible.

So how do I get links back to my website?

The short and long answer is quality content. Google tells us that if we want to get backlinks then we need to produce quality content. This is taken directly from Google webmaster guidelines.

“The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?”

If we produce quality content then other websites will want to link back to us naturally. And that makes sense, right? I’m sure you have experienced this. For example when I read a particularly interesting blog post, I might share a link to that blog on a forum or I might bookmark it at one of the social media sites such as Digg or Mixx.

The more quality content a site produces the more links it gets and the higher it ranks. If you get enough links from a sufficient number of really trusted and authoritative websites, then your site will naturally grow in trust and authority. This is known as natural link growth or natural link velocity.

We can therefore conclude that if we want to rank high in the search engines, we just need to create a seo friendly website and create content that is so interesting,people will link to us naturally.

There’s just one problem.

Creating quality content and encouraging natural linking can take a massive amount of time and effort. Of course I would always encourage people to create sites with quality content. However If you are intending on using SEO to drive traffic to your website (and you should be) and want to make money sooner rather later you are going to have to start building links yourself. Really link building is the most important activity to start any SEO campaign. If you want to rank quickly then you must build your own links. If you put in the time and effort to build links, then you will be picked up by the search engines and you will be rewarded by higher rankings. Higher rankings equal more money (assuming your product or offer is relevant to the searcher).
So now you know that you need to build links here are some tips on where you can build links from.

1. Article Directories

Article directories are a good place to get backlinks from and can drive a lot of targeted to your website. Furthermore the articles themselves can get picked up by the search engines. However I would always suggest ‘spinning’ your articles, so that each article your submit appears to be unique content. As I understand unique content from different ip addresses, has more seo value than links from duplicate content.

Click this link here to find 100 article directories.

2. Press Releases

There are many sites that allow you to submit a press release for free and also allow you to include a backlink in the press release. Also press releases can get picked up by search engines, so can help to drive extra traffic to your website. You never know write something really newsworthy and could find yourself being talked about in national newspapers or radio stations.

Click this link here to find 20 free press release sites.

3. Social Media Sites

There are hundreds of different social media sites and they can all help to build backlinks and drive traffic. If you manage to get on the front pages of Digg then you could potentially drives tens of thousands of visitors to your website.

Click here to see the list of top social media sites.

4. Forums

These are great places to interact with other people and build backlinks. Although you must check the forum rules before posting links, as some have strict rules on posting links to stop spammers.

5. Blogs

It easy to find blogs that is relevant to your niche and post comments on them. You’ll get a nice backlink and may drive some traffic to your website. Just make sure that your comment looks as if you have actually read the post. It is infuriating to blog owners to have constantly monitor and delete spam comments. Also try to find blogs that allow that allow do-follow comments (I’ll do another lesson on this but do follow means that link juice will be passed to you).

6. Directory Submissions

There is some debate as to the SEO value of directories as many people argue that the search engines see directories as nothing more than glorified link farms. However I personally don’t believe that it can do much harm and may even help you drive some traffic. Just be aware of scams promising huge amounts of directory submissions.

7. Local Business Directories

You can list your website on many local business directories which can help to get drive some traffic to your site.

8. Friends Websites

If your friends that have websites, why not ask them to put a link on their site back to yours? If they are your friends then they’ll want to help you out.

9. Offer content in exchange for links

You can offer webmasters content in exchange for giving you a backlink. Webmasters are always looking for fresh content and if you are a good writer then many will be happy to accept your content in exchange for a link.

Final word on effective link building tips.

There are 9 link building methods that you can implement right away. However I just want to mention that when you are building links you should always try to get do-follow links from highly trusted, highly relevant websites. Backlinks from websites with a high page rank (the higher the page rank, the more trusted and authoritative the site is seen in Google’s) that are relevant to your niche carry a lot of SEO value. If you don’t believe me, why not take Google’s word for it. According to Google’s webmaster guidelines,

“It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links”.

Furthermore you should try and get a link within the actual text of the page. These are known as contextual backlinks (I’ll do another lesson on them). If you concentrate on getting contextual backlinks from highly trusted, highly relevant websites then you will get a lot of SEO value and you will be able to rank well.

Now, I’m not saying that this isn’t hard work because it is. If you product content that is interesting and compelling enough then overtime highly relevant, authoritative sites will link back to you. But as I mentioned this can take a lot of effort and time and you want to start ranking soon, so you can make money. So the alternative is to build links yourself or outsource the link building to someone else. One service that I highly recommend is Free Traffic System. Free Traffic System helps you get highly relevant contextual backlinks and best of all its free.

The guys running free traffic system really know their stuff when it comes to SEO. They have a lot of evidence to show that contextual backlinks from relevant websites help push up the rankings of a website. I strongly recommend that you sign up to Free Traffic System right now.

I hope you enjoyed this post and now understand that in order to rank well you must start a link building campaign.

To your massive success,

Guy
P.S. If you enjoyed this post please, please link to me.