Get Backlinks

Right, we have done our keyword research, then written some quality content now we need to get backlinks to our website. Why and what are backlinks? Backlinks are where other sites put a link to your site on their site. The reason we need them is that this is one of the major things search engines look at to determine where websites should appear in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

The more websites that link to you the higher your site will appear in the SERPS. It isn’t as simple as that of course. There are many factors that determine your position on the SERPS. However this page is about how you get backlinks and we’ll discuss the other factors later.

A few years ago the best way to get backlinks was to contact another site and ask then to swap links. You’d put their website url on your site and they’d do the same for you on their website. These types of link exchanges were abused very quickly and in the end the search engines gave less weight to this method of getting backlinks. Today it is considered that you need to get backlinks from sites without linking back to them. The first problem is that no one is going to give you a link if you don’t give one back. So link exchanges are dead. So now what do you do?

Luckily there are many ways to get backlinks without providing a link.

1. Social Networks – Facebook and Twitter
2. Social Bookmarking – Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon
3. Forums – and your website in discussions
4. Blog commenting – commenting on blogs and including your link
5. Web 2.0 – building other sites to link to your main site – Squidoo, Hub Pages, WordPress, Blogger
6. Directories – Yahoo, Dmoz

All of the above methods allow you to get backlinks to your site without returning the favour! To actually start implementing these ways to get backlinks is going to take a lot of time and hard work. In fact this is a fulltime job in itself and a lot of people outsource to SEO companies and backlinking services. This costs money though and can be quite expensive if you choose the wrong service. I recommend Fiverr which is full of people offering these types of services and I use them all the time for my backlinking needs.

There are many products that offer ways to get backlinks automatically and many are crap! There are some gems though and I’ll be adding them to the site as soon as I can.