Do you have problems building links as a newbie?  Here’s a great guest post from Claudia, and she’s going to share with you her experiences building backlinks for her new blog – she’s managed build 1,000 backlinks in just 4 months!  That’s not magic folks, it’s hard work (every day) – and I’ve always said that linkbuilding is like putting small deposits in the bank that you can withdraw someday!  If you have a newbie online experience to share use my contact form to let me know.

Like every newbie blogger, after setting up the basic structure for my blog and putting up a few posts, I came to a point where I noticed that nobody is gonna look at my blog and also the search engines won’t find my great content, when I wasn’t promoting the blog and building links pointing back to my site.

So I started my quest to get backlinks. I started to comment on blogs knowing this would give me a link. I learned about the advantage of the “Top Commenters” feature, but didn’t quite grasp the concept until one day when my backlinks were still only around 20, they jumped up to 141. I hardly could sleep that night and all I could think was 141 backlinks!, 141 backlinks! (I can see most of you experienced bloggers smiling now!)

From then on I kept an eye on what plugins the blogs were using that I came across when searching the internet anyway. If someone had a “Top Commenters” or “Recently Commented” section in the sidebar of their blog and a backlink to the commenters site was given, then I added that blog to my list to revisit and comment soon. I also tried to use free software to find blogs with these plugins or who had dofollow enabled, but I only found a few blogs that were suitable but none in my niche.

Although commenting was now increasing my backlinks at a faster pace than I first imagined, 99% of the links I got were nofollow and of no value for ranking in Google.

I started to do guest posting, initially mostly via “Free Traffic System” which is a free service that lets you put articles or blog posts on other peoples blogs. Your post can appear in up to 30 blogs and you get two links from each blog. Once I had a few articles posted there, I noticed that I got some traffic from bing (MSN) and about 2 weeks later also from Google.

Otherwise, for guest posts I also looked on the websites that I was visiting anyway, sometimes you can find a remark that guest posts are welcome. I am not sure what made the difference. Maybe finally some PR was carried over to my site, but also having anchor text within a blog post linking back to my site could have had the effect of pushing my rankings in the search engines a bit. My positions are still quite unstable, but at least it looks like guest posting is an efficient way to get valuable backlinks.

At present, my site which is less than 4 months old, gets a bit over 1,000 backlinks, depending where I have them checked. For a quick overview I use Yahoo Site Explorer, but for a more thorough overview I like SeoPro as they also show which links are no/dofollow and the PR of the site linking to me. Most of my backlinks are from blog commenting (again the majority from a few blogs that I got site wide backlinks from, so they might fall away at some stage), from guest posts, my ezine articles, technorati, internal linking, a few directories and some other social network or video sites that I was using.

All in all, it seems to take a lot more time to promote my blog than to actually work on the blog itself, which is sometimes not easy when you only have 1-2 hours after work. But then, it is also exiting and quite a learning curve. I guess I will be quicker next time! 😉

In case you curious want to have a look on my diet blog, or you want to lose weight and need to know: “How many calories should I eat to lose weight?”, then you are invited to click that link and find out!

Author: Claudia Ohst from Diet on Autopilot

Recommended sites:

SeoPro Free Backlink Checker