Way back in the 90’s SEO was easy. Search engines relied heavily on page content. The more dense the content was for a given keyword, the better it would rank. Those of us who are old enough will remember web pages with streams of hidden keywords repeated over and over again. This worked OK for many years, but as the number of web pages grew something had to change. Enter Google.
What Google did that was introduce authority, relevance and backlinks. Backlinks are links from other sites to your site. The more the better. Relevance is normally determined from on-page content and backlink anchor text (ie the link between the <a> tags). Authority is determined by factors like the number of backlinks, the size and age of your site and the rate at which it is updated.
The generation of backlinks and authority is commonly referred to as off-page optimization or link building. It is often said SEO consists of 10% on-page and 90% off-page optimization.
OK, so now we know how important backlinks are I’ll present some techniques on how to acquire them. The following techniques are widely practiced but do come at a cost. They all require either time or money. As with all SEO techniques, there is always a trade off between the two.
1. Create Worthy Posts
If you generate quality posts often, chances are that other people will create backlinks to your site for you (hint, hint).
2. Participate in Forums and Blog Comments
Most forums and blogs allow you to include a link to your site as a little thank you for posting a comment. Comment as often as you can but do ensure that your comments are constructive and offer some worth to the readers of the site. Most webmasters (me included) vet all comments before they are published. Although not strictly necessary, try to post to forums or blogs that are relevant to your site. The more relevant the site, the higher the backlink weighting. For example, one backlink from a relevant site may be worth five from a non-relevant one.
3. Submit To Directories
There are literally thousands of free and paid web directories. Google publicly states that they do not agree with paid directories, but they do not punish you for using them. Paid directories often have higher authority. You may also pay a company to hand enter your site to free directories or use a free service such as http://www.easysubmits.com/. The more directories your site is accepted into the better.
4. Social Bookmarking
I personally believe that social bookmark backlinks from sites like Dig, Propeller, Mixx, Twitter and so on have a very low backlink weighting. They do however speed up the indexing process and I make a point of social bookmarking all my new posts . I highly recommend the Amplify Firefox plugin as it can be configured to automatically create several social bookmarks in one press of the mouse button. It can also be coupled with Posterous to save buckets of time. Paid software such as Bookmarking Demon also save a lot of time as they typically submit multiple articles and feeds to hundreds of social bookmarking sites in one go.
5. Create Some Web 2.0 Free Blog Sites
There are many free blog sites such as Wordpress.com, Squidoo, Blogger, Weebly, HugPages and so on. Create multiple keyword and SEO optimized blog sites on each and link them back to your site. Ensure that the content on each site is unique but relevant. The weighting of backlinks from copied content is very low (or the backlink may not count at all). There are other linking methods you can use with Web 2.0 blogs as well such as building a link silo (see this video). This takes a lot of time and effort.
6. Ezines
Write stand alone 500+ word articles and submit to ezine directories and article hosting sites such as EzineArticles. People are free to copy your articles and place them on their website as long as they include a link to your website. You can also use paid ezine submission services such as Unique Article Wizard. Although generally expensive (US$100+ per month), the number of generated high quality backlinks can be huge.
7. Link Building Sites
Quality link building services such as LinkVana can cost a lot of money (UD$140+ per month for an unlimited number of sites) but they are definitely worth the cost if your site relies on search engine rankings to make sales. Link building sites add articles (written by you or one of their staff) to a massive collection of websites to produce a near unlimited number of quality backlinks.
As can be seen from the list above, there are many methods for creating backlinks. Try to use them all for best results.
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