Tutorial: How to Build BackLinks to Your Blog or Web site Regularly:

The key to getting more traffic, more rss subscribers, and more visitors is having lots of quality one way links to your site. Sure, writing quality content over time will get you lots of organic links – and they are absolutely worth the most and carry the most weight. But believe it or not you can jump start this process a bit yourself and complement the natural organic links yourself with quality backlinks.

*Disclaimer: Many people don’t link building links because of the time involved. If you want to get ranked on the top of the search results and need someone to “just do it” for you, contact me for a linkbuilding quote

A lot of the posts I write have to do with link building, and I decided to make this link building cheat sheet page so you can just come and get a half dozen quick methods to build quality one-way-links to your site. If you do some link building every day for 30-60 minutes+ in addition to your content writing, you’ll have better search engine listings in no time! In addition – links don’t last forever, so regularly building them assures that over time as links fall away, new ones are always being created.

How to Build Quality Back Links

Update Your Profiles: Be sure to create and update as many online profiles as you can with your web site and blog info, and you’d be surprised that they can not only generate good backlinks and SERP listings, but they can also acquire their own pagerank and authority over time. Most of these services also have ways to network and connect with other bloggers and web site owners, opening up additional online marketing potential. Try creating the following profiles:

MySpace
YouTube
iGoogle
Yahoo 360
MSN Spaces
myBlogLog (service terminating Jan 2010)
bumpZee
BlogCatalog
entreCard
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Technorati
FriendFeeder
Diigo
YouTube
StumbleUpon
Del.icio.us
Digg
Break.com
Yelp.com
Ping.fm

etc. Especially don’t forget the profiles of any forums that you visit on a regular basis!

Link to Yourself: If you own more than one site – blogroll yourself (if your sites are related), or in your footer. The last thing you want to do is link to every site you own on every site you have – but linking to your own sites is usually a good idea. If your content is not the same niche you don’t want to do this. If you’re afraid that the blogroll is going to get you in trouble with google (because it shows up on every page of the site and build too many links too quickly) – then when you write posts, link to your other site’s posts (that are related) whenever you can. Also – interlink you posts as much as you can. When I write a post about Wordpress Hacks, for example, I often link other directly related posts in the article or post. This builds up your own “inlinks”, and it’s healthier for your web site to have a good balance of “external” and “internal” links for best search engine rankings. This is also called “deep linking”.

Create a Free Blog: You can create “mini-sites” to have your own little online support network. You can create one pagers on a single topic, or have a full fledged blog or web site on one or all of these free services:

Wordpress.com
BlogSpot
Yahoo! 360
MSN Spaces
Yola.com
Webnode.com
Squidoo
HubPages

Write a few quality posts and create a good about page linking back to your site(s). Add a post every few weeks linking to your sites.

Comment on other blogs: You’re probably already commenting on other sites, but concentrate on the ones that use “dofollow”, and only comment on sites highly related to your content. Another kind of blog to look for are ones that have the “CommentLuv” plugin installed (like this one). This posts a link to the last blog post in you RSS feed right after your comment for double the backlinks for every comment you make! There’s also a plugin called “Top Commentators” that lists the top commenters in the sidebar of the blog. Make enough comments on that blog – and get listed sitewide for massive backlinks at once! Many blogs (like a default Wordpress install) use the “rel=nofollow” tag so you won’t get any link love for your commenting efforts.

Just google dofollow blog list.

Also – here’s a short list of links to blogs that use dofollow:

Search for Better Sites to Leave Blog Comments on: Some blogs have special plugins installed called “CommentLuv”, “KeywordLuv”, and “Top Commentators” (sometimes Top Commentors or Top Commenters). These are sites that can either link to your last post in your RSS feed (CommentLuv), or (if you comment enough on the same blog) place your link in the sidebar of every single page on a blog you’re commenting on. In A Newbie’s Link Building Experience, Cladia Ost talks about how she built 1,000 backlinks in just 4 months using these methods.

Do one of the following 3 google searches (or a variation of it):

“your keyword” keywordluv
“your keyword” commentluv
“your keyword” “top commentators”

For example the google search “ipod” “top commentators”, should give you a google search of blogs that have some kind of a post or content about an ipod, in addition to a “top commentator” widget in the sidebar. This type of blog would be a better choice to build links on than just a normal one.

Publish in Article Directories: One of the best ways to gain quality backlinks is by publishing high quality articles in an article directory. Article marketing is a great link building strategy, and there are many quality article directories to choose from. I read an article not long ago about the top performing affiliates that were promoting one of the highest converting clickbank offers. Out of the $12 million paid in affiliate commissions for last year for that offer, nearly all of it was paid to just 2% of the affiliates. The other 98% got next to nothing. When the affiliate were informally polled to find out what the difference was between those that were successful and those that weren’t – the answer was article marketing. 98% of the affiliates did little to no article marketing. 2% of the affiliates submitted from 50-500 articles (and the one’s that made the most were the ones that submitted upwards of 500).

Here’s a list of article directories for you to submit to:

Read my Article Marketing Guide to an in-depth how-to on article submission and article directory marketing.

There are also sites that allow you to upload documents, and you can use them in the same way you use article marketing sites:

Scribd
Issuu

Comment for .edu backlinks: The search engines value .edu backlinks much higher than regular ones, so target them. Do a custom google search like this:

site: .edu “wordpress”

This brings specific results from .edu sites that contain the keyword “wordpress”. Change the keyword to something that matches the niche of your site, and dig through the results to find .edu blogs that you can comment on – be sure to find the ones most relevant to your blog topic.

Use Contests to build links: One thing that is very popular is to run a contest with a good prize, and ask people to review your site (or stumble it, or link to you) to gain ‘entries’ in the contest. The other way is to be a sponsor of a contest and offer a prize. All the sites that post about the contest will list you as a sponsor and link back. I did this recently and got 100+ backlinks in just a week.

Use Forum Signatures to build links: This is one technique that I don’t use as much as I should. Find forums in your niche, and post – whether asking questions or answering other people’s questions. Be sure to use forums that allow links in your signature file, and put links that lead back to your site(s). Forum postings usually last a long time, and if you become an “expert” by answering many posts you can gain lost of traffic from it as well. It’s also one of the few places that you can ask questions, and still build links while you’re learning!

The best way to find forums in your niche, or search for specific forum posts on a topic using keywords you’re building links around – is to use one of the specific “forum search engines”. That’s right – they have search engines that ONLY index form posts, go check one out:

BoardTracker
BoardReader
Omgili Forum Search

Get Reviewed to build links: There’s nothing better for your blog than getting a quality review in relevant context from a good site. Of course, google frowns on paid links and you can get google penalty for doing that. What about paid reviews? Isn’t that basically the same thing? If you pay someone to review your site (and link to it) isn’t that a paid link? This is probably the next thing google will attack, and I really feel sorry for all those that paid $450 for a John Chow review because I really feel a google penalty is coming their way. The solution is to network with other bloggers to attract free reviews. Review other blogs you like and read a lot and don’t ask for anything in return. Like organic links you will get organic reviews.

Guest Posting is a GREAT way to build links: Write an article for another blog and you are putting yourself in front of another audience that currently doesn’t even know who you are. You have to remember that as a blogger you are basically the same as a freelance journalist. If you were used to writing for People magazine, but suddently got offers from TV Guide and US Weekly would you turn that down? No – it builds your reputation! Think of guest blogging in the same way and find blogs in your niche that accept articles from other authors. Look at this article Joe Tech Wrote for John Cow, he got his post in front of a completely new audience with 1300 rss subscribers! Start small and request to guest post on blogs with less than 1,000 readers, and then when you’ve posted a half dozen of these – ask one of the big sites to guest post, all they can say is no – right?

Linkbuilding with Directories

There are hundreds, if not thousands of directories that you can get listed in to boost your backlinks. Many have a fee to get listed, and many are free. Some just require a reciprocal link back. Here’s a list of quality high pagerank directories you can get listed in for free:

Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC): Pagerank 8 directory accepting free submissions. Many directory listings are Latin American – but many are just good resources.

Kelly Search: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions. This is a great business to business directory. I like the fact that you can submit to different categories with different descriptions and URL’s if you want when you signup.

Canlinks: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions. This directory is nice because once you submit the form your blog is automatically listed – you don’t have to wait for approval.

Free Links Directory: Pagerank 6 directory accepting free submissions, but only if you reciprocal link

Pegasus Directory: Pagerank 6 directoy accepting free submissions. Also accepts reciprocal and paid submissions.

Skoobe.biz: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free and paid listings.

Surf Safely: Pagerank 4 directory accepting free submissions, but you must have a PICS label and family safe.

Flookie: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy to submit to.

Resource Help: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions for reciprocal link back.

Zoomdir: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, but if you do reciprocal link you’ll get listed in just days (vs. months with no link back).

Zico Sur: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions, very easy submit.

Sufficed.com: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link back.

A2Z Web Index: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link.

Directory World: Pagerank 5 directory accepting free submissions with reciprocal link back.

Link Building Resources from my Blogging Friends

Exchanging links is a great old school way to build links. Ben Barden has a great article on How to Initiate a Link Exchange that you should read!

To write the best comments or links to your site from others you have to learn the best linkbait tacticts. impNerd says he has found the
12 best articles on linkbait.

Stephan Miller has a great tip to Use Old School Marketing to help build links which involved Shareware. Do you have any idea how many download web sites there are online? Do you have an eBook? You can submit it to download sites for thousands of quality backlinks, follow the link to Stephan’s site for details.

Kevin Davis has some great ideas about linkbuilding. One of them is How to build links and traffic using blog carnival. This is a site I honestly had completely forgotten about. Basically it’s a site of targeted pages that have a collection of links of a topic – and they call that collection a “carnival”. You already have some great posts written on many topics, submit them (for free) to the appropriate “carnival”!

Another method that Kevin uses is by using trackbacks to build links and get more traffic. You may already know this, but when you write a post – you should “trackback” whenever possible to get an automatic comment on their page (when approved). Are you using trackbacks for all the blogs you write about and link? Follow the link to Kevin’s site and watch a video that will teach you about trackbacks.

While there are a lot of ways to build links – video is becoming increasingly more popular. More and more online marketers are using YouTube to drive traffic and use the video medium in addition to their web site to earn money online. In this video, Kevin shows us how to add links to YouTube video descriptions!

This list will grow with time, be sure to also check out my previous posts about linkbuilding and generating quality backlinks:

Build Links: Sponsor a Wordpress Theme
Guest Blogging Builds Better Backlinks
10 Ways to Be Your Own Link Whore
Guide to Article Directory promotion
How to Build Better Backlinks in Forums
Working the Wiki’s for backlinks
Blog Comments Promotion
Turning Spam and Splog into Backlinks and Gold
Get more RSS subs with a Hug
Viral Recommendation Carousel

Do you have a link building cheat? If you have a good one, I would love to list it and link back to your site! Just comment now or contact me now!

Would you rather have an expert do this kind of work for you? I can provide you with expert linkbuilding services and get you on the top of the results pages. Contact Me for a Linkbuilding Quote