In this tutorial, my aim is to cover everything you need to know about SEO link building, including ways to build backlinks and common questions you may have.<\/p>\n
Before I begin, let’s me quickly go through some fundamentals.<\/p>\n
– Link building is about building links FROM other websites to YOUR website, not from YOUR website to OTHER websites. You may laugh, but many newbies can’t even get this idea right.<\/p>\n
– Next fundamental. In the SEO world, we often use the word backlink, which refers to links from OTHER websites TO your website. If you link to other websites, that’s NOT a backlink to you.<\/p>\n
– Last fundamental. SEO link building is not just about building backlinks. It’s about building SEO backlinks. (Read this article on the difference between a backlink and an SEO backlink<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Once you are clear on the fundamentals, let’s move on to the exciting part……<\/p>\n Ways To Build Backlinks<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n 1) Google’s answer to link building<\/strong><\/p>\n Officially, Google wants you to create great contents and\/or services in your website, so that people can see the value in your website and link to you.<\/p>\n If you strictly follow this strategy, it may take you a long time before you can see any result.<\/p>\n But there are ways to accelerate the process and I shall list them below:<\/p>\n – Create link bait. For example, write an article on 101 ways to do something or a long list of resources. This kind of article will usually arouse people’s interest within your niche and thus link to that article. If you have a blog, put your link bait article in the Popular Article listing. The idea is to get more people to read that article and link to it.<\/p>\n – Provide a useful online application on your website, so that people will naturally link to you in their blogs or forums.<\/p>\n – Distribute free templates or scripts of any kind, such as WordPress theme, website template, free script, free plugin etc, with a backlink to website. When people use them, they will have to link to you.<\/p>\n The rest of the methods are not recommended by Google. But they are proven to work and are very likely to continue working for many years to come.<\/p>\n 2) Effective textbook ways to build backlinks – Distribute articles to article directories, aka article marketing.<\/p>\n – Post comments in blogs.<\/p>\n – Post in forums.<\/p>\n – Create pages in Blogspot, Squidoo, Hubpages and other social networking sites.<\/p>\n – Adding stories to Digg, Propeller and other social bookmarking sites.<\/p>\n – Press release.<\/p>\n – Submit your link to non-reciprocal link directories.<\/p>\n – Exchange links with friends or other webmasters, through article exchange or blogroll exchange. Though Google doesn’t like reciprocal links, reciprocal links still count. Just don’t over do it. What Google frowns is EXCESSIVE reciprocal links.<\/p>\n 3) Other seldom-mentioned but effective ways to build backlinks<\/strong><\/p>\n – Create accounts in social networking sites and membership sites that show your profile in public (there are thousands of them out there, with high PR) and include backlinks in your profile. You can create as many accounts as you like. (This method is extremely spammy, but it works.)<\/p>\n – Create your own linking network within your domains. This is applicable to those with lots of domains. You can divide your domains into groups and cross link them. Just make sure that they are not reciprocal links. (This method can be very powerful!)<\/p>\n – Create a simple software and submit it to hundreds of software directories, with a backlink to your website. Most software directories have high PR. These are great backlinks for you.<\/p>\n 4) Buy links<\/strong><\/p>\n Although Google says “do not buy links”, buying links still work. If you want backlinks from high PR web pages (not website), buying links seems to be the only option for most people.<\/p>\n But use it at your own risk. I doubt Google has an algorithm to catch you. In most cases, websites are caught because someone reports it to Google.<\/p>\n 5) Participate in link building systems<\/strong><\/p>\n – Link exchange networks<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This is the earliest form of link building system, where webmasters create a link directory on their websites and link to one another. Such links are categorized under reciprocal links (i.e. I link to you, you link to me).<\/p>\n This kind of link building system is infamous and Google hates it because it doesn’t provide any value other than boosting search engine ranking.<\/p>\n There are rumours that Google ignores exchanged links (or reciprocal links). I doubt it. Google may discount reciprocal links, but it doesn’t ignore such links.<\/p>\n Honestly, I am not a fan of link exchange and have never tried any. My advice is stay away from such networks because there are better and safer linking systems out there.<\/p>\n – 3-way link networks<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Instead of “I link to you, you link to me”, 3-way link<\/a> networks work by linking A to B, B to C and C back to A. To Google, these are not reciprocal links.<\/p>\n This is my preferred link building network and I have used it for years. The only downside is such a linking network can only build backlinks to the homepage. If you want to build backlinks to internal pages, aka deep linking, you’ll have to resort to the 3rd option.<\/p>\n – Content syndication system<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n In such a system, you will post articles to a network of blogs<\/a> or websites within the system. You can view this as another form of article marketing, except that the submission process is much simplified since you are doing it through a centralized system. This is my favorite link building strategies because I can build unlimited backlinks to unlimited web pages.<\/p>\n
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\nJust pick up any SEO ebook and you’ll see these link building strategies:<\/p>\n