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Link Building Cheat Sheet
1,535 viewsThe 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.
A lot of the posts I write have to do with link building, and maybe in the future I’ll make that into a blogging series. For now 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!
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, such as MySpace, YouTube, Google, Yahoo!, myBlogLog, bumpZee, BlogCatalog, entreCard, etc.
Link to Yourself: If you own more than one site - blogroll yourself (if your sites are related). 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 - then when you write posts, link to your other site’s posts (that are related) whenever you can.
Create a Blog: Create a new blog on Wordpress.com or BlogSpot, google or Yahoo! 360 (or even MSN Spaces), and 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. Toast Egg & Me reminds me of the importance of dofollow, but this reminded me of how “dofollow” can help YOU build links as well! When you are commenting on other blogs, be sure to make a list of ones to comment on that “dofollow” (generate backlinks to you). Many blogs (like a default Wordpress install) use the “rel=nofollow” tag so you won’t get any link love for your commenting efforts.
Here’s a short list of links to blogs that use dofollow:
Publish in Article Directories: One of the best ways to gain quality backlinks is by publishing high quality articles in an article directory. Read Getting Results with Article Marketing at Affiliate Confession. You might also want to check out the brand new Article Buzz Directory recently launched.
Comment for .edu backlinks: The search engines value .edu backlinks much higher than regular ones, so target them. This post a Mixed Market Arts tells how to 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. Are .edu links worth as much as you think? impNerd says .edu and .gov links are not.
Use Contests to build links: One thing that is very popular right now 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 very often (and I probably should do more of). 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. This tip graciously submitted by Adsense Addict!
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 long enough 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. If you feel the need to ask for a (free) review, than Money News has a list of 16 blogs that review for free.
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!
Exchange Content with another blogger: I was thinking about guest blogging one day when I thought - why not exchange content with another blogger in my niche? We both with by exposing ourselves to a new audience, but it’s almost like one step beyond entrecard, because instead of merely introducing someone, but exchanging content you are recommending and endorsing them. I setup the Content Exchange Blogging Community last month to help promote and foster these blogging network relationships.
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!
Sometimes you can build links by doing something that hasn’t been done before. Joe Tech heard of a service with a new API called IzeaRank and he decided to be the first to build an IzeaRank widget and it got him a bunch of quality backlinks quick.
Belonging to blogging communities and networking with other bloggers is a great way to get backlinks quickly, but over at Life is Colourful I read about using entrecard credits to build links. You can throw a contest and for each entry bloggers have to either link back or post about the contest - or you can flat out offer to pay entrecard credits (EC’s) to any site giving you a review. To me the latter is pretty much bordering on paid links.
This list will grow with time, be sure to also check out my previous posts about linkbuilding and generating quality backlinks:
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!
