Using SEO techniques to improve their site’s ranking is how most webmasters spend a large part of each day. Without a lot of high quality, high ranking backlinks you might as well forget about index position and traffic.
But everybody talks about backlinks like there’s some deep, dark secret involved and if you can solve the mystery you’ll win the brass ring or something. It’s not as hard as some people make it sound. If you want more backlinks you just have to know where to look. Here’s my 5 killer tips to get more backlinks to your blog.
Article Marketing
I know, this is old-hat, but it’s still one of the best methods for building long-lasting high quality backlinks. Here’s what you need to do:
Write great titles – Cutesy titles, puns and comical titles seem like they’d attract a lot of attention but they won’t. This is the Internet and people come here looking for fast answers. Write titles that include your keyword and explain what the reader will learn when he reads the article. Let him know that your article holds the answer to his problem.
Write great content – This is a given. Over-deliver on whatever you promised in the title. If you promised 7 Tips, then give the reader 7 tips. If you think you’re going to be able to force them to click through to get the last two tips you’re wrong. They’ll just be angry that you mislead them and they’ll click away.
Write a great resource box – Your resource box needs to contain your name, the name of your website, the URL for your website, your USP and an anchor text link to some relevant content. Don’t try to send the reader to your link for Baby Bottles if they were just reading your article about Dog Training.
Submit to directories – I find I get much better results if I submit unique articles to individual directories. In other words, I don’t like spinning articles so I can mass submit to hundreds of low-quality sites. I submit to one unique article to one high PR directory, and another unique article to the next.
Use guest blogging to generate specific backlinks
The backlinks you generate from article marketing are great for authority, but I also like to generate backlinks that will bring in some traffic. The best way to do that is to submit guest blog posts and the benefit is you can pick and choose your sites.
Look for blogs using CommentLuv for quality backlinks
Blog commenting is a pretty standard method and you can go one better if you look for blogs using the CommentLuv plug-in. This plug-in allows you to leave your comment and it automatically generates a link to one of your own blog posts, plus it includes your Twitter link. Once you register, you don’t need to register again and it allows you to select one of you 10 most recent blog posts to link to. I make a point of searching out blogs that are using this plug-in. Start with a Google search for CommentLuv blogs.
Add your links to directories
There are some pretty high ranking website directories out there – dmoz.com comes to mind first. Do a Google search for website directories and look for relevant, high ranking directories to submit your link. Remember – stay relevant and provide quality.
Use free 2.0 sites to generate the backlinks you want
This is my favorite. I like to use the free 2.0 sites like Blogger, HubPages and Squidoo to set up a whole backlinking network. Squidoo is my favorite but any web 2.0 property works, as long as it’s got some high authority and good PR. The benefits of using these sites are well worth the few minutes of extra effort you have to put into it.
With most of the 2.0 properties you can include links to whatever you want, and with Squidoo you can include as many links as you want, too. Unlike traditional article marketing where you get 2 links in a dinky resource box, and if you’re lucky you can sneak one into the body of your article (as long as it’s relevant and falls beneath the fold!), with Squidoo you can do whatever you want as long as you provide quality content. Of course, it’s a given – Squidoo is a high PR site, so the links you do generate will bring along a lot of authority. More so than most article directories.
These 5 killer tips to get more backlinks to your blog are important because today it’s more about the quality of the links you generate. You can have 10,000 links coming into your blog but if they’re all from poor quality sites they’re not going to help you a bit. You can use these tips to generate better quality links, with less effort and in half the time you’re spending on all of that automated crap.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!