Contextual Backlinks – Links within Relevant Content

Most links really are contextual links, which leaves a large pool to obtain them from. Here are some methods, both free and paid to diversify your link portfolio.

When posting a blog, you have control over the amount of links within the text as well as the anchor html you use when linking. For this reason, blog 2.0 sites are very popular; they allow public users to create subdomains or subdirectory parasite blogs, with complete access to unlimited posts. If you do a search for "get a free blog", "create blog", or other combinations you will see a huge list. The downside is there are usually a relatively small finite list of free host solution sites; rather than post hundreds on 50 or so ips, it's best to branch off to new solutions to obtain your contextual backlinks.

Much the same like blog posting, article marketing starts with open to the public free registrations. Places such as ezinearticles, hubpages, buzzle, qondio, squidoo, knol and goarticles allow submissions, but most require approval, and stringent rules for 100%, well-written, unique content.

Many webmasters overlook press release submissions, both free and paid for in content links. When submitting a press release you can embed a hyperlink within the text, but be sure to give something of value to the reader, whether it's a reason to check out the service or product, or a unique added benefit of it. Just because you aren't breaking news on the 6 o clock news doesn't mean you can't harness this medium.

Social bookmarking links, Directory Listings, Forum Signature Links, Blogroll/Footer/Sitewide Links,

Because of the high attrition rates of the public blogs and article websites, many professional webmasters choose to use more secure, but expensive outlets such as private blog and article networks. These typically cost a monthly fee. Build My Rank and Link Vana are the two primary juggernauts in this field, which only allow unique content, but there are others that allow contextual backlinks around spun content. If you don't know, spun content is essentially rewriting your posts, replacing synonyms and slightly changing sentence structures to appear more original (which helps weigh more in the Search Engines eyes).

These networks have either a large personal list of websites, or bring together other article marketers together. SEOLinkVine, ArticleRanks, ALN, MyArticleNetwork, and Unique Article Wizard (UAW) are just a few to name. However, since this content is spun, (use a program titled The Best Spinner, TBS) and indexing these posts can be difficult it's best to marry this technique with a backlinks indexing service such as BacklinksIndexer which builds links in volume until the spiders recognize the posts, and the backlinks within them.

Contextual social media/social networking backlinks are a growing trend that doesn't appear to be slowing down. With Matt Cutts (google search representative) explaining that tinyurls and shorteners pass pagerank juice, it becomes apparent that even small tweets of 160 chars and facebook fan page status updates can have links surrounded by relevant keywords. If you don't, you should create a ping.fm account for your online business. This way when you make an update, you will get over twenty incontent, diverse ip backlinks. Granted, many of the links will be no follow (which means the search engines don't count it for much), but every bit adds up, and services will usually pick up and disseminate the information along with the links.

Writing a post for another website that isn't traditionally accepting of articles (unlike a public blog creation or article website), will give you links on websites that many of your competitors simply won't attain. For this reason, it's important to build relationships within your niche, and offer to write a high quality, unique article with a link back to your site. This is the most time consuming step since it considers some level of salesmanship and making contacts, but can also build credibility and referral traffic (and of course contextual backlinks). Never overlook the power of interlinking on your own properties. Interlinking helps the spiders understand what a page is trying to rank for, and can be done tastefully within one's own blog platform.

All the other methods are great for ip diversity and spreading the risk, but when it comes to rankings, nothing beats an in content backlink on an actual page with PageRank. To create a network of high pagerank websites it takes some know how and patience, as well as capital. Domains are auctioned off on godaddy each day, some with Pagerank as high as 6,7, and even 8. With a lot of power to go around, these domains can then have your backlinks added to them to dominate the competition. Obviously this technique can be a bit expensive but it's the pinnacle of your contextual link building journey.