SEO – Link Building Series: Backlink Building Methods

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   A couple of posts ago, we saw how internal linking and optimization can be done within your blog or website in order to improve reach and thereby help Search Engine (SE) bots to crawl and link relevant pages. Now, it’s time to learn about various link building techniques in order to obtain a lot of backlinks to your blog (This topic could be boring to those who have read it 100 times elsewhere). As we understood sometime back, no ‘nofollow’ backlinks with relevant keywords in the anchor text will boost the search engine rankings of your pages.

Ways to build your Backlinks

#1 Blogroll & Link exchanges: This is the most common way of building links whereby on mutual consent the links are exchanged using the blog roll space. This is also less spammy in nature and sometimes will do the role of advertising for your blog.










#2 Link love: This is not exactly my way of link building but there are a lot of people who give and take love with no nofollow references to each others’ posts. If you link to and from relevant posts, it is actually beneficial to both the parties. There are people who regularly publish link love posts.
#3 Directory submission: You can submit your blog URL to directory services some of which provide dofollow listing. In most cases, relevant front page listings come at a cost.
#4 Blog commenting: Blog commenting on dofollow blogs is a great way to improve your inbound links. In addition, if the blog supports a top commentator, commentluv, keywordluv plugins, it can improve your chances of getting dofollow links from more relevant sources.
#5 Forum posting: Many forums these days provide dofollow links via post signatures of signed up users. Though the link strength of forum backlinks are relatively weak, a number of them will always be of help. Please read my article titled High PR forums to help popularize your blog for more information on this method of building backlinks.
#6 Guest posting: Guest posting on popular blogs will not only build one or two relevant links to your blog but also attract some traffic, get some subscriptions and conversions.
#7 Via services such as blog themes, widgets and badges: If you build and market your own free themes and widgets, you will have a chance to put backlinks on those free products (e.g. Free WordPress themes, blog rank widgets etc)
#8 Link baiting: Link baiting refers to the process of publishing some content/post so exciting, unique and compelling that people willingly would link to such content. The baits could be something like plugins, free online services, free tool downloads etc.
#9 Paid links: Paid links or buying links are another way to improve your backlinks but these come at the risk of being detected and blacklisted by search engines such as Google. Google believes that such unethical ways of link building inorder to boost page ranks are methods to sabotage their logic of identifying the relevant links.
#10 Article submission and spinning: Another way of building links is article marketing and/or spinning. This method is explained in detail in one of my posts on article submission sites

Other tips for effective link building

• Whenever you bump into a blog in your niche with similar ranks and statistics, make it a point to contact its author via contact forms for potential link exchange queries and/or blogroll entries
• Three-way linking (a => b, b=> c, c => a) is supposed to be better than reciprocal linking (a => b, b => a)
• Keep track of the URLs or blogs with which you have exchanged links (especially in three way linking). You may loose track otherwise
• Make sure that your link partners use dofollow links if they promised to do so
• It is always beneficial to exchange links with pages that have a low number of outbound links. This minimizes page rank dilution
• Use the NoDoFollow Firefox add-on to check the rel properties of links
• You can use free tools like comment kahuna commenting software to search and comment on blogs of your niche and/or have specific keywords in them
• Read the comment policy of blogs where you are commenting to save you from the risk of getting marked as spam. Also gently ask the bloggers whether keywords in URL are okay (some of them don’t allow this)
• Gradual and slow link building is always better than high speed link-building (such as article spinning or purchasing links in bulk)
• Stay away from bad neighbourhood (rated sites, copyright violations, pirated content etc) while exchanging links as blanket bans by Google can put your online life int jeopardy

I hope that I have covered almost all known methods of link building in this post. One of our online buddies has recently started a bigger post on the same topic. You might want to check out his comprehensive guide on building backlinks as well.