blogGaining backlinks is the most important factor that will increase your website’s rankings. In fact, the leading SEO experts agree that 70% of SEO efforts should be geared toward building backlinks. So focus less on tweaking title tags or page rank sculpting and direct resources to where you’ll get the most bang for your buck – building backlinks!
Link Directories: Easy, Bottom Of the Barrel Links
The easiest links to get are from link directories. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of these link directories provide little value when it comes to boosting your rankings. The only time where these links tend to carry weight is if the directory is locally focused.
Buying Links: Easy, Very Risky
Buying links violates Google’s webmaster guidelines, and could earn you a Google slap which manifests in a sudden rankings drop or delisting if you’re caught. With that said, there’s a thriving industry for buying links. If you have the stomach to defy the search engine gods, here’s an excellent link buying guide.
Article Directories: Low-to-Medium Value
Submitting articles is still a great way to gain backlinks! There are two schools of thought when it comes to article submission.
- Go for volume, less on substance. You churn out vacuous articles, and submit to as many directories as possible. The end goal is the author byline link in each article.
- Go for substance, less volume. You deliberate, and write fewer articles that contain fresh ideas, or a unique perspective. The end goal is for this content to be picked up and syndicated on other websites, hopefully with the byline intact!
I might catch some flak for saying this, but I prefer the volume approach. There are better options for exceptionally crafted content – examples in the next heading.
One last note on article submissions: The essential element to submitting articles is the author byline. Often byline links are not no-followed, meaning they will provide some rank juice . It’s important that these backlinks include your keyword phrase in the actual link text (a.k.a. anchor text).
Guest Articles & Blogging: Medium-to-High Value
This link building tactic is more difficult than article directory submission. Content at this stage requires more effort, not only must it be unique it should rival journalistic writing. Your article will be vetted by a blogger or an editorial staff who are keen to provide high caliber content for their readers.
Links produced by these efforts tend to carry more weight. This is because you’re hitting the holy link trinity – relevance, context and neighborhood.
- Relevance of the page to the topic in the anchor text.
- The surrounding text gives the link contextual meaning.
- The link is coming from a website in the same neighborhood. This provides additional context to the link, giving it more weight.
Additional tips for guest blogging. While some bloggers openly accept guest posts, the vast majority do not. If you find a relevant blogger in your niche who doesn’t accept guest posts, start building a relationship by commenting on their blog. Broach the idea of a guest post after you’ve built trust.
Create A Widget: Medium Value
People love to add widgets to their websites. Again you could take the volume versus relevance approach with widgets. When you create a highly relevant widget (Web MD widget example) it’s bound to end up on contextually relevant, but fewer websites.
The downside to widgets is that some webmasters may remove the link. One way to relieve their angst about sending traffic to your site is making the link open in a new tab using the target=_blank” attribute.
Creative Commons License For Content – Medium Value
People love to share and repurpose content on the web. With a creative commons license you can state how you’d like to be attributed when people remix your original work.
All content, including video and pictures is fair game. I’ve had success providing old catalog photography to the Flickr community under a CC license. The pictures have been used in a number blog posts, and Photoshop tutorials.
Social Bookmarking: Low to Medium Value
Primarily, social bookmarking sites are better used for traffic generation, which requires an active base of followers. However, a number of these sites are do follow which make them good candidates for backlinks.
Do-follow social bookmarking sites:
Propeller
Mister Won
Tedigio
Here’s a more comprehensive do-follow social bookmarking list.
Create Something Unique To Your Site – High Value
This might be pillar content or an online tool unique to your industry. It should be so funny, thought-provoking or useful that people feel compelled to link back. That’s the essence of linkbait.
Link Building Conclusion
Link building is critical to the success of an SEO campaign. Gaining the necessary backlinks is only limited by your imagination. As I test out new ideas I’ll keep adding additional link building tips to this list. In the meantime, let me know what’s worked for you in the comments section!
Tags: link building, offsite seo
Jesse,
Thanks for the good info. As a newbie, this gives me an idea on where I should concentrate my efforts on increasing my websites rank in the search engines.
I agree that back links tactics in link building is not an easy part to do. I appreciate that you have shared ideas on some effective link building techniques.
The paid link building services is still a strange one to me. I see places selling 300 PR6+ links for $200 and so on.
Not that I think they could deliver anyways, but I’m quite certain if a page recieved 300 pr6+ links in a week or 2 some red flags would go off down at google.
That’s some great info. And I’ve found Propeller to be one of the best social bookmarking websites. My links from there are always indexed and when someone shares your link with a group you get another link from the site.
I appreciate your input on guest blogging. I’ve written a couple of guest posts (I was approached, not the other way around), and I was debating the pros and cons of putting my fresh content on someone else’s site rather than mine.
Adam
Backlinks are important but main problem is that everybody knows that. If you write in English it can be difficult to get your site at the top of search engines even not as popular keywords.
Great post.
Getting backlinks is a real art, i read some where that the rule to evaluate links is the time it took you to get the link, the longer it took its probably better.
thanks.
I’d ever bought one way backlink with PR6 and PR5 for a long time ago but they didn’t improve my website pagerank yet. My website is sill in the PR3 since last year. I don’t know why or google have other factors for calculate the pagerank other than High PR incoming link to the site. I know that if I have a backlink to my site from PR6 website then my pagerank should be PR4 , is this true???
Thanks.
Hi,
I discovered your web site on google for dofollow sites and I must say, Great post on gaining backlinks. You have a great site here! I like your theme very much! Preserve up the very good work. I just added up your RSS feed to my Google Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you later on!… Here Is A Way To Play Games FREE And Make Money Too
Best Regards Terry
Buying links is realy very risky, one i lost a lot of money due to that
Something’s broken in your Mister Wong link. You might want to fix that.
I do not plan use a link building service, ever. It can destroy your brand image. I encountered some problems with guest blogging, however. I operate in a very niche market and I realized the there are not much blogs talking about my field of expertise. Also how do I recognize whether a blog accepts a guest blogger? Thanks
Great information. It’s nice to see that people still take the time to write about fields that they are interested in and have knowledge about to help people in learning more about this subject! Feel free to follow us on Twitter :: Twitter
Seems like you`ve made a small research about backlinks efficiency. By the way, thanks for the collection of social bookmarking services.
Most directories are worthless, but there are a few that can be a real boost such as DMOZ and some other paid ones (Yahoo, BOTW, etc…). They do tend to be quite expensive though.
I think that submitting your articles and press releases to directories has high value in relation to directories & blogs. They provide you with anchor text link and good ones have PR of 6.
Nice post. I try to make some linkbuilding to my blog, and i am sure this post tips, can help me a lot. I think the linkbuilding part of SEO is the most annoying.
(Sorry cause of my bad english – i am Danish)
This is seriously amazing information! Everything I know and didn’t know about SEO has been mentioned – kudos!
I’m not sure about link directories, but article directories work big time. I spent a lot of time studying my competitors, and this is where my search led me. Guest blog posts and guest articles are very useful too, so always be on the constant lookout for popular blogs in which you can add a post or two – if you want to boom your business and take it to the next level!
advancements and less invasive techniques, the procedure is probably not as painful as it used to be.
Gaining backlinks is one of the goal in SEO. Thank you for sharing. I hope SEO people can also read this.
I agree that most of the hard work is focused on your link campaign, but it is not the most important!
In paragraph 1, you state that building backlinks is the most important. That can be misleading. If you pick wrong keywords or do not optimize your site correctly, your link campaign efforts will simply not be effective.
It’s like building a good motor for a 10000lb car. I would beat you with my roller blades.
Gaining backlinks are very important for gaining popularity in both Google and for different users.
I enjoyed reading this. I only joined the big social networking sites, but after seeing your dofollow networking sites, I feel like I am missing on some link juice. I will have to re-evaluate my position with low profile networking sites. Thanks.
good site,thanks
Getting Backlinks is most important and the best way is commenting to do-follow blogs and writing guest posts..Guest posts provide for quality link building…Buying links never seems worth the risk but thanks for the link..Maybe i ll check it out.
Nice post, I really spend my time reading your post at it help me a lot on how to become good in SEO.
Absolutely right! Gaining backlinks to increase page ranking. keep sharing us new ideas especially when it comes to SEO.
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whoops i had no idea that there was such danger with backlinks! thanks for the heads up
Spammy backlinks are worthless and has no any effect. Nowadays I get only some high quality backlinks and that’s it.
good information, thanks admin
You got some great ideas here. I enjoyed checking out the widget site, and I’m going to look into article directories more. Thanks
On the paid links part, Google doesn’t always penalize for paid links.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736
They clearly state they understand buying/selling links is part of the economy, but they will only penalize if such links are used to manipulate rankings.
Getting backlinks is most important and the best way is commenting to do-follow blogs and writing guest posts..Guest posts provide for quality link building…Buying links never seems worth the risk but thanks for the link.
I do love the ‘value’ you inserted for each method.
Looking at your competition’s back links is a method I use.
Hi,
Backlinks are very important for a website. These are very helpful for getting higher positions in search results. Google considers backlinks in Page Rank calculation.
@ Rahul is right Paid links Google never accepted
I hope more people are really reading Jesse’s blog. There is a lot of incredibly valuable information that Jesse is giving away for free. I can personally attest to the fact that many of his techniques work, and that you could improve your business (or church) with just one of them. We use several of his techniques @ Crosspointe.
I actually had to read this article twice because it was so good. Directory links really are easy to get, but not much help either (just like Jesse said), while other forms of link building are better but more difficult (manual/targeted blog commenting)?
Agree with Ankit Batra, i think one of the best and easier ways to build quality back links is comment on do-follow blogs. However is kinda hard to find those
this is an informative one! congratulations for this great article.. constant linkbuilding helps page rank up
You are right about most of things, but it is very hard to get back-links these days. And google algorithms is looking more and more factors, so link building is not that crucial anymore. If you do it in the wrong way you could easily get totally opposite results. Sometimes when I get a backlink, my site gets lower SERP in a next few days.
nice guide, thanks for the summary on off page SEO.
Good advice! Link building is vital! Very Very true!
But without good keyword rich content then your website is floating in never never land!
Just wanted to point that out too for newbies!
Only problem is SEO’ing takes time! I find it so boring! Has to be done tho!
And as they say! “rome wasn’t built in a day” HAHA
nice work!
MM- Craig.
Still Backlinks is one of most important task for SEO.. it would be remain valuable in new SEO trend 2012?