7 Methods for Building Backlinks:  Increase Your Search Engine Love

Building backlinks to your website is highly recommended in the Internet marketing community these days. This practice is especially helpful for the purpose of drawing organic (read "free") traffic to your website. And, if you don't have traffic to your site, you don't have much if earning money is your goal.

By building backlinks to your website, you benefit in a number of ways. First, your placement in the search engines can improve, since the number of backlinks pointing to a website appears to have considerable impact on search engine ranking (love). Second, you may also attract traffic, as visitors on the other sites see your link and click over to see what you're offering.

The rest of this article will focus on several backlink building methods that are great for beginners and experienced marketers alike.

Social Bookmarking

There are now literally thousands of social bookmarking sites. These sites offer an opportunity to bookmark all of the websites (including yours) that you find interesting and want to keep track of. Bookmarking your site often means you're creating a backlink too.

Onlywire is a free site that will bookmark about 22 Social bookmarking sites for you automatically.  You will have to open accounts with each of those services to get started, but it's pretty automatic after that.

Bookmarking Demon is another option that posts to bookmarking sites. This program will submit all of the internal pages on your website, in addition to your index page, if you wish, and can store urls and website information.  Very convenient.

Website Directories

These also are in great supply. These sites are storehouses for information about all sorts of websites, sorted by topic. Many allow you to submit your website for inclusion for free and create a backlink if your website is accepted.

Link Directory Submitter semi-automates the process of submitting your website for inclusion on web directories.  Once you get the information set up for a specific website and you get a rhythm going, you can move pretty quickly in submitting your site to hundreds of directories.  It's okay to do this many in one sitting because the directories' response time varies quite widely. Some add your link immediately, others take weeks or months. You won't end up with 100 new backlinks overnight, which might raise a red flag with Google.

Link Exchanges

These are also known as reciprocal links. You allow me to put my link on your website and I allow you to include your link on my site. Reciprocal links are considered more valuable if they are placed on a website whose theme is relevant to yours. There is currently a lot of discussion about whether reciprocal links count for much at all any more.  While they were once thought to be valuable backlinks, they may not be at this point.

Backlink Submitter is a program by the makers of Link Directory Submitter. This software helps you identify other websites in your niche area that have link pages and semi-automates the process of installing the links.  It works very nicely, but is it worth your time?

SEO Elite is a premier software created by Brad Callen. It does so much more than assist with reciprocal link exchanges, but it does do that.  SEO Elite double checks which of your reciprocal link partners is actually maintaining their link with you.  It searches out affiliates to promote your products, records where you are ranked in the search engines for each of your keywords, it tracks your competitors' advertising and much much more. Extremely powerful software. 

Blog Comments

Many blog owners welcome readers' comments in reaction to their posts. The reader can generally include a website link along with their comment, creating a backlink. Just watch out for blogs that include the "no follow" tag because then the backlink won't count.

Comment Hut identifies a list of blogs, Squidoo Lenses, and/or Hub Pages within your niche. It sorts by page rank if you wish and semi-automates your comment making. You can create several pretty high page ranked backlinks in just a short time. This is delightful software.

Press Releases

Submitting a press release entails writing up a short news story about your website or some of its content. It's a who, what, when, where, and how of something likely to be of interest to the media. As with many of these methods, there are free and paid options. Of course you include a link to your site in your content. 

You'll want to use keywords in your press release title and copy. This can lead to ranking in the search engines for those words and traffic to your site, in addition to the backlink you receive.

PRWeb is probably the most well known Press Release service and it has a cost attached.  Here are some links to free press release sites:

Article Marketing

Some say article marketing is the best method to draw free traffic and ultimately lots of backlinks. The webmaster writes an article on a topic relevant to their site and submits it to one or more article directories with a resource box incorporating links pointing back to the website.

Instant Article Wizard provides research on topics you specify, from the Internet.  The information actually comes from article pages already published on the net.  The intent is that you can then quickly create an article by picking and choosing which information from the research you would like to include.  It's super important that if you use this software, you use the research to gather ideas, but then rewrite it in your own words with your own flavor.  Otherwise it's not original or unique.  IAW is very easy to use and really is incredibly helpful in writing an article.

There are 100s or even 1000s of article directories on the web.  Ezine Articles, GoArticles, SearchWarp, Article City, and Article Dashboard are preferred by many marketers. You can choose to distribute your articles to just 1 directory or to hundreds of them. To receive optimal value from the backlinks, though, it is important that your articles are at least somewhat unique (maybe 30% unique) from each other.  In other words, don't submit the exact same article to hundreds of directories. You won't get credit for all of those links.

There are several networks that will submit your articles for you. The Content Spooling Network is one of these. These folks have a system that assists you in creating dozens of variations of your articles, so you are submitting unique copies to each directory. CSN also has a system for outsourcing the writing process, allowing you to do as much or as little of the article marketing process as you desire. 

Article Post Robot is a software program that will automatically submit your articles to directories for you. You push the button on your computer and maintain as much control over the submissions as you desire.  The worst part is creating accounts at each of the directories to begin with, but once you have completed that task, this is a great tool for article marketing.

Link Networks

These are typically private networks of blogs or websites on which members can post content which includes a link to their website. Often the blogs that are available in these networks have a fairly high page rank, say PR5-PR7, which is an attractive feature. The value of a backlink can increase if it is placed on a webpage with a higher page rank.

Article Underground offers hundreds of private label rights articles each month.  But the real value of their program is their "announcer" blog network. The members have access to 30+ blogs on which they can post article snippets and include links to their websites. The members choose the anchor text and so make it the links very relevant to the content on their sites.  Article Underground's blogs all carry a page rank from 4 up to 7.  It's really an excellent program and is well established.

Backlink Solutions is newer and very innovative. They also offer the blogs on which to post article snippets and links to websites, but they have automated the process more than AU. It's really a snap creating the snippets and completing the posting.  Backlink Solutions' product is still really emerging.  They will soon be offering different platforms, ie a variety of types of blogs and other site creators on which to create the backlinks. 

The primary benefit of both Article Underground and Backlink Solutions is how quickly you can generate backlinks and get a new website spidered and indexed.  Both programs offer so much more than has been mentioned here.

Using all of these methods at the same time to create backlinks might lead to being scattered and ineffective. If you're interested in building links to your website, start with one method, complete it thoroughly and then move to another.

Of course some of the techniques, like article marketing, are never complete. There is always room for more, so intersperse this with other link building methods. With some concerted effort you will be able to create hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your website and really feel the search engine love.