Guide to building backlinks

It is not a question of whether or not you need backlinks for successful SEO, the question is how to get them, especially quality ones and unfortunately it means having to work with others. While you can discuss details pertaining to other websites anchor texts, it is not the same as administering your own site as you don’t have full control over backlinks.

Time spent building quality backlinks is never time wasted.  The most acceptable methods for building backlinks are posting in forums, listing in directories, blogs and article directories.  This considered unacceptable are inter-linking, linking to spam sites, buying links or linking to link farms.

Directories, forums & article directories

Getting your site listed on DMOZ and Yahoo means that you will get some quality backlinks free. This is also a good way to get noticed by search engines and visitors alike.  While inclusion in directories is free there is a drawback in that sometimes you have to wait a few months before you get listed in the categories you want.

Search engines index forums so posting in them, as well as blogs, is a good way to get backlinks containing the anchor text you are after, especially if the forums or blogs are respected ones.  But, beware, forum and blog administrators can edit or delete your post should they think it doesn’t fit in with their policies. They also don’t allow links in some posts unless they are relevant.

Posting to forums can be short and requires little effort while submitting articles to directories is more time consuming and need careful thought put into the writing of them, but they are worth the effort.

Content exchange & affiliate programs

You can offer interested site RSS feeds for free and when they publish them, you will get a backlink to your site which bring with the potential of a lot of visitors searching for more details about your headline.

Affiliate programs tend to be an expensive way to get backlinks as the affiliate commission is in the range of about 10 – 30%, but they are a good way to build quality backlinks and a good way to attract visitors.

Press releases and news announcements

This approach is not your everyday way to build backlinks but it gives great results.  There are many and varied site that publish press release or news announcement for free and a professionally written press release can attract a huge amount of visitors and the best is that any backlinks you get from respected sites like these can only boost your SEO efforts.

The only drawback is that you cannot release press releases unless they are newsworthy, so if there is no news, there are no press releases.  This is not your most common method for building backlinks.

You might also consider making use of a tool called Backlink Builder which will give you a list of sites where it is possible to post articles, messages or postings.  After you have identified potential backlink partners, you can visit each site and post your content containing your backlink.

Related posts:

1. A step-by-step guide to link building
2. Could you write a press release and do you know where to send it?
3. Do you have news worthy of a press release and you just don’t know it?
4. The Press Release Angle For SEO
5. Press releases for SEO

Tags: SEO, SEO Linking

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 2:38 pm and is filed under SEO Linking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.