Friday, February 5, 2010

How to Build Backlinks

 The Power of Dofollow Backlinks

  One of the things search engines look at to determine where your site should rank is the number of links from other sites to your site. They will also count internal links from one page to another in your site. Some sites let you post links called bookmarks to their sites. These will only count towards your page rank if it is a dofollow site. Dofollow simply means that the top three search engines are  will follow the link and add it towards your page rank. Other search engines don't pay attention to the dofollow or nofollow code. So just because it is a nofollow site doesn't mean you shouldn't post your link on it. Plus there are two different types of nofollow. rel="nofollow" and robots="nofollow". Google's bots will follow the first but not the second. But neither will effect your page rank. Other factors that affect your score are the kind of site that the backlink is coming from and that site's page rank.


Top Ten Backlink Building Techniques 

  1. Guest Blogging: There are a couple main reasons you should consider guest blogging. You can put yourself in front of a new audience and become an authority and a well-known name in your industry. This will get you more exposure and traffic back to your website. Of coarse you also get a backlink to your site.

  2. Broken Link Building: This involves finding broken or dead links, recreate the content, then ask the people that were linking to the broken link to link to yours. This is time consuming but can get you more links and traffic.

  3. Reverse Engineering: This involves finding your competitors backlinks and getting the same ones. This takes quite a bit of work as well.

  4. NewsJacking: This is another tricky one. This involves anticipating news trends and using media coverage to build links and get traffic. It requires you to create content related to a breaking news story.

  5. Data Driven Content: Make your content more attention grabbing by adding your own unique data. People will want to link to your article as a reference to the data. It will make your content more shareable and interesting.

  6. Reddit/Social Media Marketing: Posting on Reddit and other social platforms to build links. This is another tricky one. You can't appear to be spamming. There is a protocol to posting links on Reddit.

  7. Link Reclamation: This is an effective way to build backlinks with little effort. You just need to do a Google search for mentions of your brand. Then asking the author to add a link to the mention.

  8. Content Syndication: You can republish your content on other sites to reach a broader audience as well as build backlinks. This will get you traffic and build brand awareness.

  9. Local Citation: Any online mention of the name, address, and phone number of a local business. This will help with local SEO. It will help customers find your brick and mortar store online.

  10.  Influencer Marketing: Getting an influencer in your niche to bring awareness to your brand. Find an influencer with a large engaging audience in your brands industry. Ask them to place a link in there blog or social media account to your site. This is usually done as a partnership where the business pays the influencer.


   You will want to limit the percentage of social bookmarking sites linking to your site. Too many and they won't hold as much weight. Some other ways to build links is to write blogs, submit articles to ezines and to post comments on blogs and forums. Doing this will create what is called a link wheel. There are several techniques to getting more backlinks. To check how your site ranks pick a keyword that is related to your site and google it. If you find your site on the first page your doing great. If it is a few pages back you need to do some more work.