11 Great Backlink Building Methods

Although optimizing your blog’s content for search engines seems to be a more attractive way to improve its SEO since it is under your complete control, backlinks are the backbone to your websites’ SEO success. While it is true that you have limited control over backlinks, they not only help you to bring in traffic but also help you out tremendously with your Google page rank. More so than custom tailoring your content.

1. Linking To Others – When you write an article and link to another blogger’s blog without expecting anything in return (of course you at least notify them of what you’ve done), the chances of them linking to you when they see you have good content are very high. People appreciate generosity.
2. Article Directories – Submitting  your written work to sites like Ezine Articles and Go Articles can rapidly increase your back link count.
3. Forum Posting – You need to be careful with this one and try to keep you links on topic. Many forums have an off-topic area where people may discuss anything they like. Use this to promote your content if your blog is not related to the forum. If it is, well then bring your links up in regular conversation within the targeted forum areas.
4. Listing In Blog And Site Directories – Another free way to get the word out there. Requires a lot of work to manually add yourself into the myriad of directories out there however in the long run it is worth the effort. Yahoo and DMOZ are popular ones.
5. Joining Up With An Affiliate Program – Great but expensive way to build backlinks.
6. Content Exchange – Many sites are hungry for content and do not want to write it on their own. If you were to offer your RSS feed to them and allow them to publish your articles, you would get a link in return plus residual traffic.
7. Link Baiting – If you have a high profile website that everybody would like to be exposed on, put an offer out there for them to write a review on their blog of your blog in return for a backlink. Most bloggers cannot resist an offer like this and will likely pull the trigger.
8. Writing Great Content – This should be the kingpin of you backlinking success. It is the natural way to build backlinks and frankly, without good content, you don’t have a website. How it happens is that eventually other bloggers (with similar blogs) will see your fantastic content and will end up linking to it on their blogs since it is considered noteworthy.
9. Visit Other Blogs – Go check out other blogs within your niche. Read their posts and write a couple of good comments. Comments are great because not only does the blog owner notice you but your name is also hyperlinked in the comments section. I have had many people come to my site this way from other blogs.
10. Exposure – Get your articles on every social networking and bookmarking sites possible.
11. News Releases – Definitely not an everyday backlinking technique. Send out a press release to other related blog owners anytime you have something new and big happening on your own blog.

How Not To Get Backlinks

Just be aware though that not all backlinks are good as being affiliated with “link farms” can harm your reputation in the eyes of Google. This is why I generally steer clear of link exchange programs. Also, keep an eye on your inbound/outbound link ratio. Try not to let your outbound links outnumber your inbound links.

Tags: back links backlink building backlink building methods backlinks baiting links build backlinks DMOZ ezine articles go articles google google page rank link link baiting link exchange link farms links page rank search engine optimization SEO Yahoo