The Ten Commandments of Link Building

When considering the inbound links to your website, you just can’t get enough of them. Getting people to link to your website isn’t easy but that’s the only way to get traffic and of course, the moolah! Webmasters and bloggers know many ways to build incoming links and use them daily to acquire more and more links.

After careful examination, I have consolidated ten most popular link building techniques into a list and here they are, for your reading pleasure!

1. Link Exchange

The most widely used and predominant link building technique is the exchange of links with other like-minded websites. This can be done through one-way link exchange, reciprocal link exchange or a clever three-way link exchange. One way link exchanges are hard to do as it only requires the target website to link back to you. People will only link to your website if they are paid or in lieu of any other incentive.

Reciprocal link exchanges are easy because you are also putting the target website’s link on your website, therefore, the give and take rule applies here.

Finally, there is the little known three-way link exchange technique. Let me give you an example of how its done. Say, you own websites “A” & “B” and want good inbound links for website “A”. You go out and do a three-way link exchange with a webmaster who owns the website “C”. When doing the exchange, you put C’s link on your website “B” (instead of putting it on website “A”), and C puts “A” link on their website. So, you are basically gaining one way link for your website “A” without losing any Page value.

In order to initiate a link exchange, you will have to contact a website’s administrator by sending an email stating what you want to do. Make sure your e-mail is courteous and you explain what benefit the other website will get out of the link exchange. You can also try visiting different webmaster forums where you can find many people wanting to do link exchanges.

2. Social Bookmarking Websites

With the introduction of social bookmarking websites like Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Redditt, Digg etc., getting targetted traffic to your website is easier than before. People will bookmark your website if it is useful to them and has good content. Every person who bookmarks your website helps you in getting an incoming link.

You can link to the bookmarking sites so that its easy for your visitors to bookmark your website. WordPress users can even download plugins which automatically put bookmarking links under your individual posts. Once someone bookmarks your website, there are chances that he will return back to your website sometime later. He might even share that bookmark with his friends/family which can get you more visitors.

3. Link Baiting

This is the most organic way of getting unlimited backlinks. Link baiting basically means offering some kind of unique content (bait) to your visitors and in turn they link back to your website. For example, ebooks, templates, custom scripts, custom graphics etc. I guess you get the idea. You can insert your website’s link in that content and as long as that content holds value and is available on your website, it is certain that people will use it and link back to you automatically. It will have a lasting effect for your website’s pagerank.

4. Web Directory Submissions

There are hundreds and thousands of online web based directories which list websites classifying them into categories. You can perhaps find lists of directories if you search on Google.com. You can submit your website’s URL to them and depending on your website quality, it will be accepted. Paid directories also exist where you have to pay an annual fee to enlist your website.

Make sure that you do slow and continous submissions to these directories to avoid penalization from search engines. Submitting your site to these directories can gain you quick backlinks and give some boost to your pagerank also.

5. Article Submissions

Depending on the niche of your website, you can write quality aritcles and submit them to various free article directories on the Internet. Article directories allow you to put link back to your website in the author resource box so that will give you backlinks and traffic too. If people like your article, they might even directly link to it.

6. Press Releases

Another effective way to spread the buzz about your website is by doing press releases. You can write press releases about your website or a particular section and submit them to press release distribution services such as clickpress, webwire, businesswire, openpress etc.

7. Blog Commenting

When you are visiting other people’s blogs, you can leave comments on their posts. Some bloggers allow you to put your website’s link along with the comments which can help you build links. Sometimes, the link that you put will have a nofollow tag attached to it which will not give any pagerank value to your website, but it can still send some extra visitors.

8. Forum Posts

Try and become a member of all the popular forums that are related to your website’s topic. Most of the forums will allow a certain number of links which can be added to your signature below every post you make. You can add your website(s) link(s) there and build backlinks.

9. Link Programs

There are various link programs which you can join for link development purpose. These programs have a lot of listed subscribers and your links are rotated on their websites which help you get visitors. Most of the time, these programs will tell you to put a piece of code on your website to allow other people’s links.

10. Creating Contests

Last but not the least, a viral way to make good backlinks is to hold a number of contests on your website. You can even offer a small amount of money for the winner of the contest. If money is short, then you could offer something else that is readily available with you as the prize. You can then ask people to link back to your contest and this will get you some quality one-way links.

Concludingly, I will say that these are some good ways to build links but if you are creative and exercise those extra cells of yours, you might come up with something that can really boost your incoming links.

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