These days when people speak about SEO, the topic of getting backlinks and link building comes up almost naturally. It is a widely accepted fact, that a very large and dominant factor of Google’s algorithm is the number of backlinks a website has. Link building should be done with caution, as building too many links in a relatively short period of time could cause your site to be penalised by the search engines.
This article will look into what backlinks are, and what some of the most common methods are to obtain them.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links on other websites directing to your website. The number and quality of these backlinks play an extremely large role in how search engines perceive your website. Generally speaking, the more backlinks your website has, the better. There is only one thing more important than the number of backlinks: the quality of each individual link.
You can easily find out the number of backlinks your site has by using our free Link Popularity Checker.
What is a quality backlink?
There are many factors which contribute to the quality of a backlink but there are some simple rules of thumb you can follow:
- The PageRank of the page on which the backlink is located.
- Install the Google Toolbar for Firefox.
- The relevance of the content on the page containing the link, relative to your content.
- If your website is a Knitting Forum, you want links from pages about Knitting.
- Pure html/text links are better than images.
- JavaScript Redirects or other clever code reduces the quality of the link.
- ‘nofollow’ tags order the search engines to ignore the link, so these are bad.
How to acquire backlinks?
Finding ways to create additional links to your site should be high on your agenda if you plan to increase your visibility and rankings in the search engines. It is important to ensure you plan a legitimate and cautious link building campaign as your website could be penalised if you engage in shady activities.
If someone offers you hundreds of links for a price which seems too good to be true, rest assured: it is. You will be at serious risk to get banned from the search engines after you find out you just spent your money on links from various link farms and other dodgy places.
Below I will share some of the basic legitimate methods of link building.
Submit your site to Directories.
One of the most common methods of link building is directory Submissions. By submitting your website to a relevant category in various directories you will with relatively little cost increase your backlink profile. Unfortunately the quality of directories has gone down over the last years and this method is becoming much less effective than some of the other methods. It is however still a valid and cost-effective method, so it would be unwise not to include it in your link building campaign.
For more information about this form of link building, please read our Link Building Submission Guide.
Article Distribution.
Writing interesting articles and distributing them to article publishing networks is a very powerful and simple method of generating traffic and visibility for your website. There are many article distribution networks which will publish your articles for free purely to get additional content. (These sites work on the principle of publishing content created by other people.)
The process is simple. You write an interesting article and then submit them to the various directories, websites and publishing networks to freely publish on their sites. Make sure you hand them content on the condition that your content is published ‘as is’ including the link back to your website.
Alternatively you could engage in paid services or hire an agency to run an online distribution campaign for you.
Use Relevant Forums.
If you haven’t come across a forum during your time on the internet you really should start participating right this very moment. There are forums on the internet discussing just about anything you can imagine. Some are incredibly popular and aimed at mass markets such as forums aimed at saving money. Others are industry specific, such as a forum about search engine optimisation. Yet again others focus on a small niche such as a forum about knitting.
Register for an account with forums in the relevant niche or industry and participate in a constructive manner. Ensure you enter the URL of your website in your profile and, if the forum allows it, in your signature. Ensure you post regularly to the forum in topics that are actually of interest in you.
Ensure you engage with the community and become known as a valued member of the community. This way you will build up a positive reputation and it is far more likely that your links will be tolerated by the forum moderators. Do not register, post once to advertise your website and then never return; it is heavily frowned upon and will result in negative reputation for your company.
Read Blogs and Comment.
This is an often much overlooked element of link building and highly undervalued due to the widespread use of the ‘nofollow’ tag on Blogs. Nevertheless, by becoming known as an active, participating blogger you will build up credibility and drive free traffic to your website.
Despite the search engines insisting they don’t follow ‘nofollow’ links I’ve experimented with website that had no backlinks of any kind. By purely commenting on related blogs the site had a very visible improvement in the search engines. How we should read these results is open for debate and interpretation but it’s generally unwise to ignore an opportunity.
I am not saying that these links are anywhere near as valuable as ‘proper’ links, but given how easy they are obtain when you are actively blogging they are certainly not worthless either. In addition to this many blogs use plugins or templates which strip out the ‘nofollow’ tag, so you will be picking up some real links along the way.
I certainly don’t suggest making blog commenting a part of your primary link building strategy, but it’s certainly worth doing in a second phase of your campaign or as part of your social media strategy.
Other techniques.
There are many more methods to obtain backlinks to your website and improve your search engine performance. If you are just starting out, the above link building strategies should definitely wield results. All you need is time, and a lot of hard work.
For large businesses in a competitive industry I would highly suggest contacting a professional SEO agency as you will need a link building campaign on a much larger scale. Generally speaking it is more cost-effective to let qualified SEO specialists handle this for you.
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