How to get back-links for your website

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How to obtain one-way inbound links for your blog or website

This lens explains how to get more traffic by getting inbound links for your website. Inbound links are an essential component of Website Promotion, because search engines consider them to be reliable editorial endorsements of the target page - in other words, they are reliable independent "votes."

How to get inbound links 

SEO copyrighting is only half the battle. Search-engine-optimised articles are necessary but not sufficient. The other half of the battle is obtaining as many links as possible. The most useful links are one-way links (links that you do not reciprocate). Since they do not involve an exchange, Google considers one-way links to be the most reliable vote in favor of the target page. For this reason, one-way inbound links are the holy Grail of SEO. This module deals with how to obtain such links.

1. Post in forums and include a link to your website or one of its pages. 

You should choose a forum that is relevant to your website's topic, and that allows its users to post links without the rel=nofollow tag. (This tag tells Google to disregard the link, although in my experience Google follows the link anyway, and in some cases even gives it a lot of weight, boosting the ranking of the target page - Google PageRank is overrated. For best results the links should be contextual: that is, they should be a natural part of the text. Write good, substantial, useful posts with a few contextual links to high-ranking websites, including your own. Make sure that the anchor text of each link is totally relevant to the target page; never use "click here" as the anchor text!

2. Syndicate content 

Write articles and syndicate them on eZinearticles.com or some other service. Make sure the article contains a link to your website. These websites tend to rank quite highly and they are an excellent source of back-links. Of course users who decide to publish your articles will do so with your link.

3. Let as many people as possible know about your articles 

The more people know about your articles, the more likely you are to get unsolicited inbound links. These links can come from a social book-marking website such as del.icio.us, or they can come from private websites.
If you have written genuinely useful articles you can ask online library services to link to you. Not all websites are suited to this sort of thing. If you sell shoes, it's going to be extremely difficult to persuade a library or authoritative directory to link to you.

Conversely, if your website's business is technical, there is plenty of scope for the creation of the sort of articles that authoritative libraries and directories are willing to link to. Do not approach them before you have produced a least 15 pages of extremely high-quality content. College websites are also great for this. You should contact them before filling your website with ads or anything else that is too commercial, if that is what you are aiming at.

4. Hold an online competition offering a desirable prize. 

Word will spread fast and people will start linking to you in forums and blogs.

The key here is to make the competition something that people will want to discuss online.

5. Network and make friends 

It is much easier to gain inbound links if you are on friendly terms with other experts and owners of websites. You'd be surprised at how many links you will accumulate if you make friends with the right people and have genuinely useful content on your website.

6. Online press releases 

If something interesting and newsworthy happens with your business you can broadcast a press release using a service such as PRWeb. The idea is to write an extremely interesting and well written press release that has a good link to your website. The press release will be broadcast to all relevant websites, and hopefully as many of them as possible will publish it, your link included. The key is to write the sort of press release that other websites would be interested in broadcasting.

7. Craigslist 

Using Craigslist SEO secrets to promote your website is a great way to get inbound links. These links won't give you any PageRank but will bring in good traffic and will boost the search engine position of the pages you link to.

8. Social bookmarking websites 

If you write a great article, submitting it to Digg or del.icio.us can get you a lot of traffic. If other readers like it, the article will make it to the front page and you will get many pageviews. If enough people like your article, you are bound to get some back-links. There are several blogs and websites that have attained a permanently high status by creating great content and submitting it to Digg and del.icio.us - you can do it too! Just make sure that your article is original enough to please the masses: run-of-the-mill copy will not cut it with Digg.

9. Rent / buy links 

The argument in favour of renting links from high-ranking websites and blogs is a very compelling one. For $30 a month you could have a one-way link from a high-ranking website. The time it would take you to accumulate such links naturally is probably worth a lot more money that the cost of these links, so it makes strong financial sense. Furthermore, Google will not penalize you for buying links; it only penalizes websites that sell links. Therefore the worst thing that can happen is that a website that is renting a link to you gets caught by Google, its PageRank is reduced and link becomes less beneficial. At that point you can simply terminate it and buy a link from someone else.

For this reason, when choosing a website or blog to rent a link from, you should avoid those that plainly admit to selling links, as they will be penalized sooner or later. The best link brokers are text-link-ads.com and linkadage.com. Renting links will boost your Google ranking and search engine referrals substantially and immediately.


Important update - links bought through text link brokers are discounted by Google 

Google now identifies and discounts paid links.

Many webmasters who purchased links noticed two things:

1) they received no SEO benefit whatsoever, and

2) the links were not listed in the "Links" section of Webmaster tools. So Google does not hide the fact that it knows those links are not to be trusted and discounts them completely.

The reason for this is that paid links are normally clustered together and are not part of proper blocks of text. Google is now extremely suspicious of any link that is not part of a decent block of text.

The fact that these paid links are often preceded by headings such as "advertisements," "supporters" or "sponsors" makes it even easier for Google to identify them and discount them in one fell swoop.

If you want to buy links, the only choice you have is to contact publishers directly and offer them a monthly fee in return for adding a text link to a relevant block of text.

Google will have a VERY hard time identifying those paid links, and they are therefore likely to have a a significant SEO benefit.

I hope you found this lens useful!

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How to get inbound links

Useful SEO links 

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Google's Webmaster Guidelines
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Webmaster World
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by glenanail

Tommy Morris is a Website Promotion & SEM expert with 20 years experience in IT and who runs one of the most successful top ranking web directories on... (more)

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