(Or… the Importance of Backlink Building… And How to Do It Properly!)

Ideas for placing your backlinks:

Backlink from the world’s most frequently visited sites

We’ll start with the world’s highest traffic websites before moving into specific ways to generate backlinks. That’s because, by placing links at any of the sites mentioned below your efforts will almost always be rewarded, even though some sites have a No Follow policy. The reason is, if just a tiny percentage of visitors click on your backlink, that can add up to a sizeable amount of traffic to your website.

www.Answers.yahoo.com – ask questions and post answers to other people’s questions with links back to your own website.

www.Digg.com – one of the world’s most popular news sites and one of the best sites to place your articles and comments. Digg has many thousands of visitors daily, and each day specific entries are chosen to feature on the home page from where you can expect literally tens of thousands of clicks for a really popular submission.

www.eBay.co.uk – and other country suffixes – create an About Me page where you are allowed mentions to your favourite sites, in this case your own! As an example of how strong eBay backlinks can be, every time I finish a new website I mention it on my About Me page and it always gets listed by Google in just a few days, compared to ten to twelve days without eBay’s help.

www.eHow.com – require upmarket article submissions so wait until you have a little experience of writing articles. Post a backlink in your writer’s profile.

www.Hubpages.com – place articles about virtually any subject on earth and include backlinks to expand ‘visitors’ knowledge.

www.Reddit.com – expert backlinkers say short blog posts, rich in content, without waffle or repetition, can attract enough traffic to bring down the destination site’s server!

www.Squidoo.com – create your own web pages, called ‘Lenses’ and leave links back to your websites. Squidoo is a hot favourite with search engines for well written lenses containing quality content. A big plus of adding backlinks daily at Squidoo is the chance to sell your lens for profit. Key ‘sell your lens’ into the search box at squidoo.com to see how it’s done.

www.Stumbleupon.com – a community for sharing ideas and interests, and placing your backlinks on individual pages at the site.

www.Twitter.com – post short comments with links in your profile.

www.Wikihow.com – you can edit existing wiki pages or even create your own. Put your link in the ‘Sources and Citations’ section without appearing too pushy. As for most sites allowing backlinks – on a Do Follow or No Follow basis – you and your products should be viewed as secondary to the aim of providing quality information to website visitors. So adding hundreds of backlinks without quality content will get you banned from the site. And from most other sites also!

www.Xanga.com – a community blog where you can post short articles or blog posts with links back to your own sites.

Submit articles to high PageRank article directories

‘Experts’ say you should not submit the same article to different article directories; I tend to think otherwise based on personal experience of having submitted duplicate content across several article directories over the past five years. All that duplicate content seems not to have affected my websites’ positioning in search engine returns. Plus I personally think a sizeable amount of traffic can be generated direct to websites featured in article resource boxes, even if articles themselves feature low or not at all in search engine returns. So an article taking twenty minutes maximum to write, and receiving just one hundred visits in the first two or three months, plus a backlink from a high PageRank site, is well worth writing.

Find high PageRank article directories at:

http://tinyurl.com/5tax1fr

http://tinyurl.com/44ks44e

Try these for starters:

Directory PageRank

www.knol.google.com 7

www.ezinearticles.com 6

www.goarticles.com 6

www.helium.com 6

www.isnare.com 6

www.buzzle.com 6

www.brighthub.com 6

www.gather.com 6

www.articlesbase.com 5

www.articlealley.com 5

www.articledashboard.com 5

www.articlecity.com 5

Submit posts to high PageRank blogs that ‘do follow’

Next to search engine traffic, blogs are said to be the best source of traffic, especially high PageRank blogs. The real beauty of using blogs to grow backlinks is that blog posts – sometimes called ‘postings’ – are usually much shorter than articles and answers, and that makes it possible to create and upload several blog posts in the time it takes to produce and place one article or research and answer a question.

So make it a priority to find as many blogs as you can relating to the subject of your destination websites and place posts daily if you can. Check the rules thoroughly beforehand because some blogs – and other sites ban multiple daily submissions.

Find a long list of ‘do follow’ blogs at:

http://tinyurl.com/6xm6hyn

www.dofollow.info

http://tinyurl.com/yfv23nz

Try these high PageRank blogs to begin with:

Directory PageRank

www.bloglines.com 9

www.blogpulse.com 7

www.getblogs.com 7

www.blogorama.com 7

www.blogcatalog.com 7

www.blogstreet.com 7

www.bloghop.com 6

www.blogtoplist.com 6

www.bloggernity.com 6

www.globeofblogs.com 6

Submit posts, articles, comments and other content to high PageRank ‘do follow’ forums

Forums comprise people asking questions and sharing ideas, and anyone whose posts help benefit fellow members can find their forum posts listed high in search engine returns with obvious benefits to destination websites.

Each forum post allows the writer to place a signature file – a bit like a P.S. on a snail mail letter, also resembling a resource box in an article – and that file links back to a specific website. This benefits writers in two ways; one being the backlink itself, the second being the potential for forum members to visit your site for more information about the subject of your post.

Posting on blogs and forums can attract instant traffic to your destination website, especially in the case of the Warrior Forum which remains active at all times. Forums like www.warriorforum.com have international appeal and thousands of active members, so you’re more likely to have people clicking on your signature file within minutes at the Warrior Forum than on websites specific to one country where if you place your post during daylight in the UK it’s the middle of the night where the forum is hosted.

So it’s usually a good idea to favour international blogs and forums over one country locations, but only having checked PageRank and membership figures for those latter sites. That’s because some one country sites have immensely high visitor rates and incredibly active membership and could be just as effective as some major international forums. For high traffic UK forums test:

www.forums.internetbusiness.co.uk – currently 18,600 members some with thousands of posts to their credit

www.forums.teneric.co.uk/internet-marketing-forum – no mention of membership numbers but some posts are receiving hundreds of views in just a few days.

Here are my own favourite forums to get you started. They are for Internet marketers and are ranked ‘Do Follow’ at time of writing, but check their current status using the tips included in last month’s eBay Confidential.

I have not mentioned PageRank because forums are renowned for constant changes to PageRank.

www.affiliateseeking.com/forums

www.forums.digitalpoint.com

www.warriorforum.com

www.htmlforums.com

www.startups.co.uk

www.dnforum.com

www.sitepoint.com/forums

Link from social networking and bookmarking sites, etc.

(‘etcetera’ including high traffic websites with mammoth traffic potential but not strictly categorised as networking or bookmarking sites).

There’s evidence that sites like Digg, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and other social sites will soon overtake other techniques as the most productive places to target your backlinks. That’s because membership of these sites grows more quickly than forums and blogs, article directories and answer sites, and shows no sign of slowing down.

Each site has its own rules about placing links and how and where to place them, and the rules can vary dramatically between locations. So you’ll need to study the rules first before signing up, joining in and linking back to your own websites.

That said, experts I’ve spoken to about backlinking suggest spending at least half your time linking from sites such as those mentioned below.

www.blinklist.com

http://bookmarks.yahoo.com

www.clipmarks.com

www.digg.com

www.facebook.com

www.fark.com

www.folkd.com

www.gather.com

www.google.com/profiles

www.hubpages.com

www.ilike.com

www.kaboodle.com

www.kwoff.com

www.lensroll.com

www.linkatopia.com

www.linkedin.com

www.myspace.com

www.newsvine.com

www.socialmarker.com

www.stumbleupon.com

www.technorati.com

www.twitter.com

www.wikipedia.org

www.youtube.com

Footnote: Don’t worry about Do Follow options at these sites, they all receive an immense amount of traffic, and all have a high PageRank. For a long list of social networking, bookmarking and other high traffic sites key ‘list of high pagerank backlink sites’ into the search box at Google.com.

Do Reciprocal Linking

Anyone with their own website will have received emails from other webmasters offering to add your link to their website, if you link to theirs. Most of these offers are well worth considering, mainly because people have usually taken time and effort to compile a list of websites, as well as website owners likely to consider their offer.

But I’m told only about five per cent of requests actually get accepted and of those not all links take place or have their desired effect. That said, if you have time on your hands this could be a useful way to generate backlinks. Start by looking for websites on a similar subject to your own and from which backlinking is likely to be more effective than from dissimilar sites. Make a note of the website owner or main contact; you’ll usually find the details somewhere on the page.

You can find sites similar to your own by keying words to describe your website content into the search box at google.com and studying the listings on the first five or six pages.

Compile a list of one hundred or more contacts. Then write a short email saying how you’d like to have a link for your site (an active link with keyword rich text) placed on their site, and you will reciprocate the gesture. Ask the other person to send their chosen text and URL to you and say you will upload the link within a specific time, and then you will send your link and text for them to upload. But be sure to check the other person actually does upload your link, and correctly, and be quick to contact them if things don’t go according to plan.

For people already known to be seeking reciprocal linking partners go to:

www.warriorforum.com Look for the section marked ‘Warrior Reciprocal Links – Buy – Sell – Swap!’

www.backlinksforum.com – lots of ideas and test results being shared here and more people with whom to trade backlinks than most people have time to manage. There’s also a place to add a profile with a backlink to your website.

Answer Questions

Answering questions establishes you as an expert and can lead to people visiting your website for more information and ultimately buying your product. But there’s another major benefit to answering questions, that being, the top question and answer sites rank high in search engine returns whenever a similar question is searched for online.

Look at the sites listed below for questions relating to your recommended products and place your answers and link back to your site.

Alternatively (and please do not get caught), ask a question to help promote your product from one computer and go answer it from another. You need to ask and answer from different computers because most larger sites track special numbers attached to all computers and can easily spot abuse.

Note also that some answer sites use the ‘No Follow’ technique which isn’t a major problem since most attract very high traffic, some of which will be redirected to websites offering more information about common problems.

Try your question and answer skills at the following:

www.answers.yahoo.com

www.groups.google.com

www.wiki.answers.com

www.allexperts.com

www.help.com

www.theanswerbank.co.uk

Submit Your Website URL To Free Classified Advertising Sites

This idea offers several benefits, one being to actually promote your own goods and services, the other to leave backlinks at hundreds of different free – and some low cost – advertising websites.

Some sites allow you to place as many ads as you like, others don’t; some require specific information about you and your products such as private email address and country base, others require just the URL for your website.

Some require you to sign up to place ads at the site, others allow all and sundry to take part. Some are very strict about their goods and services they allow to be promoted at their site, others allow all but advertisements for illegal or immoral activities.

All of which means you should study sites before placing your ads. or you could run into a situation where you’re not only banned from one site, but also unwelcome at all sites belonging to a specific company.

Find places to place your ads. at:

http://tinyurl.com/42hjb08

For starters go to:

www.freeads.co.uk

www.vivastreet.co.uk

www.classifieds.co.uk

www.loot.com

www.craigslist.org

www.ebayclassifieds.com

www.thefreeadforum.com

www.kijiji.com

www.usfreeads.com

www.adlandpro.com

www.buysell.com

www.freeadvertisingforum.com

www.free-world-classifieds.com

Find a long list of sites for placing free classified ads at:

http://tinyurl.com/6Z352KL