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If you want more money from your rankings then your backlinks is the deciding factor. Every person who has knowledge of SEO knows this because getting higher ranking equals to more visitors and the more visitors you have, the more you earn. That is the reason why backlink services are in high demand and get paid their asking prices. Sure, you can purchase some high pagerank backlinks and boost your rankings with no problem. However, don’t worry if your money is tight and you can’t invest in backlinking because in this article we are going to teach you how to do it yourself. Getting backlinks at no cost, just by sheer hard work is the easiest and the most ethical ways to increase your Google Pagerank. There are limitless places to add a backlink to but you want to focus on the hundreds of authority sites that are relevant to your own so you can place a backlink there and enjoy the benefits of having a high pagerank site linking to you.

Many SEO firms don’t build the type of links that are available for free because it is labor extensive. This leaves more room for the small guys, who can leverage the power of free backlinks. And the only downside to this method is adding your link to the wrong types of sites. Sometimes it is easy adding backlinks to low value sites. If you want to learn about some of the pitfalls that comes with the territory then read on.

One of the most common mistakes is to do all the work of getting a quality link and then using untargeted anchor text. Combining your keywords as anchor text with a high PageRank site, you can work wonders for your website but for some reason many people use anchor text that is completely irrelevant to their site: links such as “Click Here” and “Learn More.” So, a simple SEO rule to remember is to always use your main keywords as anchor text when backlinking. This is yet another easy way to make your SEO link building more effective.

Another backwards backlinking move is to spam your link instead of focusing on relevant websites. Trust me, your site’s ranking will be more stable and have more staying power by focusing on relevant backlinking methods. The backlink you placed on a sports site won’t help your daily payer’s site one bit. By taking this one extra step, you will elevate yourself to an entirely new level of SEO and leave your competition to do what they know how to do; spam sites and gain temporary ranking. No matter your niche you will find other sites to get backlinks from. But links are natural, outbound and inbound, Google wants to see links in all directions purely because it bases a large part of its algorithms on them. Links should appear natural and not in huge lists, which is why contextual anchor text is so beneficial to both parties and lies at the cornerstone of techniques like SEO target marketing.

Remember that the PageRank (PR) is of a page, not of the site. In accordance, one page on a site can be a PR 0 and another can be a PR4. Understanding PR and where you link to can add to your site’s own PageRank and place you in the category of authority site.

Lastly, don’t listen to everything you hear about SEO because most of it is wrong or only a temporary solution. In time, you will become an expert link builder.

Joe Simpson has been a full time marketer for nearly two years now, he enjoys marketing all sorts of businesses but specifically technology based ones such as UK Proxy service providers.

I really wanted to keep this one short, but backlinking is such a complex topic. I touch on dofollow and nofollow below and will endeavor to explain further in later posts…

Within the SEO field, there are three main reasons why we create backlinks – traffic, recognition and authority. Traffic is generated when someone follows the link to your site. Recognition tells Google your site exists or has undergone a change. It is created through high quantity, low quality backlinks (quantity vs quality). Authority tells Google you know what you are talking about and thus helps with your rankings. Authority links are achieved through high quality backlinks from high PR, .edu or .gov sites (quality over quantity). Both are valid SEO techniques. With a healthy mix of the two, you can ensure that your posts are quickly indexed by Google and that they index well for your given keywords.

Quantity backlinks include:

• Free directories – there are literally thousands of free RSS, article and post directories.
• Social bookmarks – like Digg, Propeller or Reddit.
• Commenting – gaining links by commenting on other similar blogs is common practice.
• Free blog sites – such as Squidoo, Hubpages or Blogger. Note that with a lot of work, these links may be promoted to quality links.

Quality backlinks include:

• High PR directories – often these types of directories cost money or have long wait times.
• Articles
• .edu and .gov sites – dofollow links of this type are difficult to obtain.
• Links from high PR and relevant blogs.

It is also worth noting that low quality backlinks also count towards authority. For example, ten low quality links may be worth that of one high quality link. Also worth noting is the follow and nofollow link attributes. Links marked as follow will count towards authority and recognition. Links marked as nofollow will count toward recognition, but not authority. Many sites mark links as nofollow to stop people posting comments just for the purpose of backlinks. As the name implies, nofollow links tell the search engine bots not to follow the link to the destination. It has however been proved that many bots do in fact follow nofollow links.

So to summarize, quantity links are fairly easy to obtain. Software such as Social Bookmarking Demon make this task even easier. Quality backlinks on the other hand are like gold and can only be achieved through hard word, great content or money (eg by using services such LinkVana).

As a final note, I should mention that I offer a free service to anyone who wishes to add a one-way backlink from my site to yours. See Call for SEO Related Articles for more information.

There are many WordPress plugins that are nice to have, but very few are essential. This is where Pretty Link is different. If you are serious about tracking the performance of your adds, internal and external links or even downloads then Pretty Link is definitely worth looking at. According to the author, Pretty Link can…

Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website

…and what’s more, the shortened URL is prefixed with your website’s domain name. This blows tinyurl.com and bit.ly out of the water and has obvious SEO benefits to boot. Pretty Link was originally borne from the need to neaten up those ugly affiliate links that often scare off would-be purchasers. With Pretty Link, you can make a URL that looks like this http://www.shareasale.com/m-pr.cfm?merchantID=16526&userID=363159&productID=466062304 into one that looks like this http://beginnerchess.org/chesshouse-22.

Once a link has been “prettisized” (I’m sure this is not a real word), it can also be tracked as per the screenshot below. This allows you to tell how often your links are clicked and which links work better at attracting potential buyers than others. This is an extremely powerful tool for all Internet marketers. What’s more, Pretty Links with different names can point to the same actual link. This is useful for example if you want to track whether people are clicking on your left side banner add or the link in your article. With this sort of tracking information you can determine which add copy attracts the clicks and which products people are generally interested it. You can then adjust the add copy that doesn’t work and rotate out the products that nobody wants.

Pretty Link couldn’t be simpler to use. Once installed and activated, expand the Pretty Link Settings group and select Add New. Put the messy URL in the Target URL section and a nice human readable slug (a tag that contains no spaces, but can contain a dash) in the Pretty Link text box. If your messy URL contains a question mark (a ? denotes the start of URL parameters) then you must ensure that you select the Standard Parameter Forwarding radio selection in the Link Options section. To use the new Pretty Link, you simply use the Pretty Link instead of the original link. For example, if you click on either of the two affiliate links given in the introduction you will notice that both take you to the same destination.

Another great feature of Pretty Link is that it allows you to update the target URL without modify the Pretty Link slug. This is useful if you want to modify your affiliate link without updating your article or add copy. This may be the case if you have found a cheaper or better product for example.

Pretty Link’s SEO benefits include an option to nofollow your Pretty Link which is useful if the linked URL is not optimized for your keyword. Another benefit is that you can chose the name of your Pretty Link slug, allowing you to add more keywords to your page in the form of links.