Building High Quality Backlinks to your Website

First let us take a look at some of the myths surrounding backlinks and SEO marketing in general.

Myth 1: The Number of Backlinks is More Important than the Quality
Completely false, I could easily get a thousand backlinks if I wanted with some simple random posting in various websites. The quality of the link is of great importance to your page rank. Posting a thousand backlinks sounds all well and good, but if your website is trying to sell a Pregnancy Guide to women do you really want 586 backlinks from a porn site?

Myth 2: All I Need to do is Post My Link
Once again, wrong wrong Wrong. You need to make your backlinks surrounded by relevant and well thought out text. If you post a backlink on a blog comment and surround it with a quality post with keywords relevant to your site the search engines and crawlers will lap it up! It's like nectar to them.

Myth 3: Buying Backlinks Will Help Me Get Started
Get started with what? Unless it's a backlink service where you are paying a human being to go through and make quality backlinks for you, you're going to end up with a thousand useless links and be stuck with a PR of N/A. Even if you're paying a human to do it, you're not guaranteed that they'll make golden backlinks for you. They might skip out and make a few hundred on a link farm or a low quality website.

Now that you know the myths it's time to learn the truths.

These are pretty straight forward, I don't even need to explain them!

1. Backlinks posted on websites with similar keywords to yours get you better ranking
2. Backlinks posted on or in high quality blog comments surrounded with relevant keywords get you better ranking
3. Backlinks posted in articles about a subject similar to your website's will get you better ranking
4. Backlinks posted in social networking will get you a huge amount of traffic and possibly better ranking
5. Backlinks posted on social bookmarking services are not always reliable but will improve your rank

These are 5 simple facts to keep in mind. And better yet the explain the 5 methods of getting backlinks!

1. Website Guest Posts
2. Blog Comments
3. Articles
4. Social Networking
5. Social Bookmarking

Posting on these 5 sources will get you a huge amount of traffic and a better page rank, but how do you do it?

Not all websites allow guest posting, but some do. Especially ones that update regularly. The best way to get this type of backlink is to look around for websites in your niche that have a "guest book" feature. You can include a critical comment about their website or product, place your link in the proper area, and earn yourself a free medium to high quality backlink!

This one is actually easy! Go to Google Blogs (google search for it if you can't find it) and simply enter your keywords in the search box. Other blogs with similar keywords will pop up, what you're looking for are blogs with this type of comment setup:

Name
E-mail
Website

If they don't have this comment setup then there is no point in commenting, except to speak your mind. Use something similar to your keywords in the "Name" section. For example if you're running a video game website, in the "name" section put "Xbox Gamer" or "video Game Lover".

This is my favorite way to build backlinks simply because it's so easy. Instead of finding blogs or websites with quality content and matching keywords to yours, THEN the process of convincing a webmaster or blog owner to confirm your comment/guest post and finalizing the backlink, you can just write an article about your topic and place a backlink in it. Gaming websites can write an article about a new Xbox game and link back to their site, political websites can write an article on the latest discussions and include a link back to their site, etc. etc. The following sites are some good ones to use for articles:

1. Triond
2. Ezine
3. GoArticles

Triond is my favorite, they'll let you write about basically anything and as long as you have good content they'll be happy to include your links. Plus you'll get paid! After calculations I've concluded that every view will on average grant you 0.02 cents USD. It's not much but it's a nice bonus considering you're practically getting paid to generate backlinks.

Ezine is a little less loveable, they're more restrictive on their content and format and don't like you using a lot of links. You have to really work to make these articles.

GoArticle is pretty good but you won't generate a ton of backlinks with it like they claim. I've counted about 4 backlinks to my sites from GoArticles.

So you think twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin, and tumblr are just for kids with too much time on their hands? Wrong. If used properly it can be one of the greatest tools to build up your exposure. Remember to add both friends and acquaintances to your network first, then start posting like you normally would and start adding friends of friends. The more friends you have in common the more likely they'll be to add you. But it all depends on your niche, some are easy to attract people to some aren't. The best social networking websites to use are:

1. Facebook (best)
2. Twitter
3. Tumblr
4. Myspace
5. Linkedin
6. Orkut
7. Google+
8. Youtube

I list facebook first because it's the easiest to get friends on. And friends will see your link. I list google+ last because although a lot of people have started using it, it's not that easy to get a network going.

Here is an article on how to gain twitter followers and maximize your exposure, it's recommended you use all of these networking tools though:

Getting More Twitter Followers: Understanding Twitter

Youtube was listed last due to it's rather...interesting nature with backlinks. Basically the more highly ranked your video is, the more views, likes, favorites, and dislikes your video has the better a backlink from youtube can be. Also Youtube isn't the recommended choice for backlinks simply because each video you make has to to be relevant to your website for the backlink to be any good, and on top of that you have to get your video ranked highly not just your website. More work for you, less gain for you, unless you already have a successful Youtube account that is. If you're set on getting every possible backlink method done, this article will help you build your video's ranking:

Youtube Under The Hood

First thing you need to understand, What Is Social Bookmarking? It's actually pretty simple, you know how you can save websites to favorites on just about every browser? It's effectively saving websites to favorites in a way other people can view it. It's fairly easy to get the backlinks on these bookmarking sites, but slightly difficult to get them up in quality.

The reason I both like and hate bookmarking sites is because your backlink's quality scales with how many views, likes, etc. it's received. A backlink with 5,000 likes and 100,000 views will be considered a top quality PR 10 equivalent backlink. A backlink that's received 1 like and only been viewed 5 times will be considered a crappy backlink. So remember, don't automatically share your links the second you sign up for these sites! Build a following, post comments, like other people's links that aren't in your niche, get people to wonder what you'll do next, then post up your links. Those little things you do beforehand is the difference between a PR 3 and a PR 10 backlink.

Some good social bookmarking sites are:
1. Digg.com
2. Delicious.com
3. Orkut
4. Stumbleupon
5. Hi5.com
6. LinkedIn.com

There are more but these are the easiest to use. If you don't really have time to submit to all of these though, there is a good organic and best of all, FREE, service that I like to use each time I make something new called Social Monkee. Here's an article explaining Social Monkee:

Getting Backlinks With Social Monkee

You need to pay close attention not only to what backlinks you have, but to where. In SEO there's something called the trickle down effect, if you have a really high quality article but it doesn't exactly match up to your website, don't backlink to your website in the article. Make another article to act as the interim between the higher quality article and your website, or make another interim if it's necessary. The quality will trickle down to your own website as the others in the web get more popularity.

If you need more detail or this isn't enough information to satisfy your needs please check out this article Building High Quality High PR Backlinks To Your Sites For Free

As it is many unfortunate souls still pay for backlinks and get scammed out of hundreds or even thousands from these "paid backlinking services". If you know someone who is, has been, or may be scammed by these con artists please share the information in this lens.

Also please support this lens by sharing it via twitter, facebook, and digg (and whatever other social networking site you may use).

Thank you.