I don’t get into talking about backlinks very often since getting someone to link to a blog you wrote should come natural and is more effective if the content you provided was compelling enough for someone to link to it. Backlinks are part of the Search Engine Optimization game most bloggers play for which raises a blog’s page ranking on the search engines. So backlinks are important but not necessarily something you want to step out of bounds to obtain. Getting backlinks an unorthodox way could cost you your page rank in search engines.
If you are dedicated to what you are blogging about and committed to offering your experiences on the subject then people are going to find you and link to what you say. What I have found that generates more backlinks to my blogs has to do with how I network to people offline more than how I network online. This goes back to the importance of having a balance of online and offline social networking.
So now that I stirred up the nest with mention backlinks here are some ways to go about getting back links and ways to stay away from that many people will tell you should do.
What is a Backlink: Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page.
The Natural Way
The idea behind backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact your contents is good and people will link to your blog.
Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours. These are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords. However, getting valuable sites to link to your site is hard to do. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks.
Ways to Obtain Backlinks
Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of obtaining quality backlinks is by getting
- listed in directories,
- posting in forums,
- comments on blogs
- and listed on article sites.
The easiest way to obtain backlinks is by commenting on blogs of relevant interest. Eventually, one of those blogs are going to link to what you have to say..that is if you have something worth saying.
The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.
Getting Listed in Directories
If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like Yahoo is a must. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice. It takes a little time and work but sometimes the pay off is good.
Forums and Article Directories
Posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.
While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.
Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs
Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.
Announcements and Press Releases
Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.
Avoid Link Farms
One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second and more important is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.
Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.
Backlinks are good, but let them come naturally from people liking what you have to say. It works better that way.
