There is no doubt about it, good content with plenty of relevant SEO keywords in the text is vital for the success of any website but just as important are backlinks from other quality sites. This is because backlinks, or inbound links, are the key to achieving high rankings in search engines, Google in particular places great value on the number of backlinks pointing at a site. The more backlinks a site has the more Google views it as a site of note as it considers that if other sites link to it, it must be a valuable site.
An internet business is the easiest, the cheapest and the fastest business to establish these days. It is also the surest means of making a living if you get it right but to succeed in making a living from any online business, you need traffic. Having an online business that no one is aware of is a waste of time.
The surest way of driving traffic to your site is by having it indexed in search engines and increasing the page rank which is almost impossible without getting plenty of backlinks from other sites. This is without doubt probably the most important technique you must apply when driving traffic to your site.
Getting backlinks in a nutshell means getting links to your site from other sites. This rapidly increases the ranking of your site in the major search engines and makes it more visible to people searching for things that are related to it. If your site is all but ignored by the search engines you have not got that necessary traffic that is essential to the life of your business.
There are several ways to get backlinks to your site including link exchange with similar types of site, although this is never as effective as one-way links. Therefore it is best to aim at gathering as many quality inbound links as possible without sending too many people from your own site via outbound links.
You can of course pay an SEO company to set up this for you, but paying an SEO company can be expensive and it doesn’t always guarantee results. It is far better to take the time to do it yourself and save yourself large sums of monthly expenses.
Here are some tried and tested ways to get quality backlinks:
Write articles
Although this is not quite as effective as it used to be and it can take some time to get your articles shown online, it is still a useful way to get backlinks to your site. Simply register with half a dozen article sites with a good page rank such as EzineArticles, Go Articles, or Article Alley and then submit a series of relevant articles with a link to your website in the resource box.
Make sure you write articles directly related to your niche, and where allowed place links within the body text as well as the resource box. If your articles are worth reading you have potential to have your articles used by webmasters and placed on hundreds of websites giving you the possibility for hundreds of backlinks.
Free directories
These are a useful method of getting known and putting in backlinks but do make sure that the links are not ‘no follow’ which tells the search engines to ignore them, thus making them useless as viable backlicks. Make sure you submit to the proper category and be patient as getting approved can sometimes take weeks. So long as the directory doesn’t have a ‘no follow’ policy this is something you should do because your website will benefit from page rank flowing back to your website.
Have informative content on your site
With informative quality content, your website will become a link bait. In other words other webmasters will want to link to your site so that they can provide quality content to their readers too. However, when you are creating the content for your site, make sure that that it is unique; search engines will penalise websites with duplicate content.
Write for other sites and blogs
Offering quality articles to other sites or blogs for free but with a link back to your own site is an excellent way of building backlinks. However do make sure the sites you choose are well established, similar subject to your own and have a good page rank or you won’t reap the benefit.
Submit videos to YouTube
If you can produce an interesting or informative video for YouTube you are allowed to place your link in the information box. This can work very well if you can convince people that your website is worth looking at and click through to.
Online press releases
Find something interesting to say and then submit a press release containing your link to as many free press release sites as you can find. Do this on a regular basis and it can build up a nice lot of backlinks
Submit your URL to free ezine directories
Produce a regular newsletter and then submit your link to all the free ezine directories which have a high page rank.
Post comments on blogs
This can still be useful on certain blogs, but watch that the blog doesn’t have a ‘no follow’ policy. Don’t spam and do write something worthwhile or you comment and your link won’t be approved and go live.
Forum marketing
Join forums which are related to what you are offering and participate actively there. Through forums, you can build backlinks also not forgetting the quality traffic that forums will bring if you establish yourself as an authority figure.
Finally even if you find all this process boring and time consuming, and we all do, remember the more effort you put in the more you will succeed. For with lots and lots of extensive back link building you can easily outrank your competitors for key phrases and keywords that are related to your business.
