Its no secret that backlinks (links pointing to your domain) are very important factor on how google ranks your website in their search results. Most other search engines also value the links to your site also …
Here is some free techniques you can employ to help you build links to your site, traffic will be a consequence as well. You don’t have to follow them in any particular order but, the more of these that you accomplish the better job you will have done …
- Write or post something people would want to link to (actually called link baiting).
- Create a resource, something that people would find valuable and will easily point their friends to
Example: directorycritic is one of the best places to find free and paid directories; people know that and recommended it boldly, sometimes they even link to it. - Exchange links with like minded blogs or sites, relevant exchanges are usually better but for luck of relevant sites any exchange is good enough, you can look in forums for people that are willing to exchange links; usually there is a dedicated section for that.
- Submit your site to free directories, can use the excellent allsumitter directory submitter to help you with that. If you need lists of free directories to insert in your favorite submitter, you can find great lists at directorycritic.com, onewaytextlinks.com (many more lists exist on the internet, it could take me a whole post just to list them here).
- You can write articles and get them posted on article directories (process similar to directory submissions) and usually you can include a few links on the buttom of each article pointing to your relevant sites. Can find article directories in directorycritic website.
- Post on squidoo.com, create any number of lenses advertising one or all your websites, its very fast and its free try it.
- Post/vote a few of your great articles/posts/pages to the social bookmarking networks, if they are worth something other people will also vote for them and in the process you will get some extra links, can also ask your friends to check them out and vote for them (Digg, delicious, Stumbleupon, Sphinn, Propeller are some of the networks I usually post).
- Include your link in your forum signature, look in the list of directories that allow signature links (+other links) where you can start hanging out and enjoy signature link love.
- If you blog or site has some sort of RSS feed functionality, submit it to RSS feed directories, you should also make available for aggregators that would like to include your content with linkback to the original posts. Here is a list you can start with.
- Participate in blog discussions: most blogs lately allow you to include a link to your blog when you post a comment, some also will add your link sitewide if you are one of the top posters (like in this very blog), find a blog that you like and post a few comments on the articles that you find interesting … be careful if your comments are irrelevant or disrespectful or full of links they might be considered spammy and will get erased.
I am probably forgetting some right now but if you read this far you have probably found one that you have not done yet …
Please share your favorite link building technique, its OK to link to your website if its offering a free link …
53 responses so far ↓
1 Adam Za7 // Oct 26, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Thanks for the tips and links to sites. I will be sure to take advantage of it.
Adam
2 paulb // Oct 26, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Dofollow social bookmarking sites and pligg sites are the best.
3 YELLOW PAGES // Oct 27, 2007 at 12:03 am
Great post! However, I do not think that directory submission is useful any more? Google hit them recently
Do you agree with me regarding the directories? Please share your opinion, so in case they are important, I need to do 1k submission.
Thanks
4 Web Designer // Oct 27, 2007 at 6:33 am
I agree–great post. I also noticed that many small (seo-friendly) directories are being hit with a PR drop recently. Its apparent their value is becoming less and less over time.
5 Ashley // Oct 27, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Yellow Pages, Directory submissions are (and pretty much always have been) useless for building Pagerank (unless you paid to submit to the now largely penalised high PR directories.)
There are however very useful for building a background of links to a site. Getting submissions might be over doing it a tad though!
6 GiorgosK // Oct 27, 2007 at 12:46 pm
web designer, maybe that is so I did not actually notice any PR drops for the small guys …
Ashley I never advised Directory submissions for building pagerank … properly texted links have always helped the search engine understand what my sites are about though
7 Ed Kohler // Nov 4, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Great tips. Linking strategies based on creating quality content are going to be the most rewarding in the long run. For example, creating articles that people are willing to link to is more valuable than exchanging links.
8 GiorgosK // Nov 4, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Yes that is true Kohler that is why I put those two at the top of the list (great content, great resource)
9 Minyak Lintah // Nov 9, 2007 at 9:00 pm
How does squido works? Is there any guide or tutorial? And i also dont understand social bookmarking.
10 Jayson // Nov 11, 2007 at 2:15 am
Thanks for the techniques. Do you know if submitting to several article directories devalues the links? I’ve read that it does and would love to save the time if it does devalue the links.
Also, some article directories let you post 3 links - do you get 3 links in this case (I don’t see why you wouldn’t)?
11 saura // Nov 24, 2007 at 8:34 am
This was a good article but nothing special about link building was discussed. I mean everything written is known almost to every blogger. The problem comes when you start executing these steps, thats where most of people are unsuccessful.
12 GiorgosK // Nov 24, 2007 at 10:47 am
Not all websites are blogs and not all website owners are bloggers … and I don’t even think all bloggers know these techniques, the newbies certainly don’t !!!
So, what parts were you unsuccessful in ?
Maybe we can focus on those instead of talking about generalities!!
13 admin // Jan 3, 2008 at 2:23 am
I think it is great when people let you put a link on their site. It has to be creating traffic for sure..And we would never knock back traffic, would we.
14 CellPhoneSignal // Jan 16, 2008 at 8:52 pm
I think these are all great tips but I’m not convinced they are the end all.
15 GiorgosK // Jan 16, 2008 at 9:36 pm
I never made the claim that they are the end all,
just some suggestions for people starting with their link building.
16 anil // Feb 22, 2008 at 9:45 am
link building is a time consuming and continuous process that every site or blog have to go through
17 MFC // Mar 4, 2008 at 7:58 am
Well I found some of this useful
18 tudomo // Mar 5, 2008 at 7:27 pm
I think directories are still worthwhile. Especially the bigger ones that Google still takes notice of.
19 barbara // Mar 16, 2008 at 6:15 am
I wonder if directory submissions are still effective. Some SEO experts say it’s not but I had some clients that did it and saw some results.
Some people are actually calling it a not so ethical technique.
But anyway GiorgiosK, thank you for the tips!
20 barbara // Apr 25, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Hi barbara -
Directory submission is still effective. The important thing in directory submission is changing anchor text. I get good result with one way links only.
21 atmmultimedia // Apr 30, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Great tips thanks for the advice
22 Brock Ventura // May 9, 2008 at 4:06 am
I created this site for passion driven people. I have no other intention then to help support and give exposure to artist. Visit http://www.talentfight.com and view how it works. I think it could be as big as my space and others but offer a way for artist to earn money and gain exposure. please offer your suggestions to help me make this a popular site.
23 peterson2020 // May 14, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Thanks for the Tips
24 mhuy-mhuy // Jun 2, 2008 at 10:05 pm
The tips above really work wonders
25 mj // Jun 10, 2008 at 4:57 am
It is been a week that I have been looking for a link exchange partners. But they are not responding my email. I don’t know what is going on. Somebody willing to help me. Thank you. Here is my site http://www.kelowna-accommodation.com/
26 GiorgosK // Jun 14, 2008 at 8:13 am
mj
Try posting your link exchange requests in the webmaster forums (or search for travel link exchanges)
I am sure there you will find people willing to exchange with you.
27 mevilla // Jul 15, 2008 at 10:32 am
Every time I look at articles like this - there is nothing we already know, all of these articles are the same, there is nothing I have not come across in the past year that is any news to us concerning link building, seems like everyone has run out of proper ideas when it comes to building links?
28 wm // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:49 am
Although all of these techniques are well known and extensively used on a daily basis - we have been focusing on internal linking for the past couple of days and have already seen huge rises in our link popularity.
Going through your own website page by page and linking pages of your own website content to each other can surprisingly increase your link count.
Go through all the pages of old content and renew it by linking to pages of new content.
29 ebooks247.net // Aug 15, 2008 at 10:20 am
Nice article, It covered the basics so people can have a solid foundations to work from. I didnt really see much higher end stuff that I would have liked, but nice article anyway. Good work. Keep it up.
30 Marilyn Tong // Aug 26, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Thanks a lot for this article. Will start trying out your recommendations
31 Angel // Aug 30, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I look at articles like this - very nice. This article very useful for link building is easy nothing promote traffic. Good information. Just Visit: http://monkeydollars.blogspot.com
32 Ryan Jin // Oct 2, 2008 at 5:32 pm
thanks for the advice ! Great Posst !
33 Goozor // Oct 12, 2008 at 6:52 am
The best thing to create free links is by writing rich content search engine friendly articles. Readers will basically link to the post and relieves us from doing manual process of linking.
34 Secrets4 // Oct 14, 2008 at 4:47 am
Great advice! I’ve been trying to get this whole link building concept down myself. If there’s anyone willing to exchange links please let me know. You can reach me via my site;
http://www.secretsofthebible.net/
35 ndev2k // Nov 3, 2008 at 2:14 am
Great article, some of these techniques will help me build up some links for my site.
36 alex // Jan 22, 2009 at 4:52 pm
well back linking and titles are the most important elements for succesfull pg rank. i have a 4 month old website which is http://www.yestatil.com and her pg rank is (3) just with the backlinking so backlinking is a must for better pg rank . And goodbage rank is a most for first 2 pages
37 Mike // Jan 27, 2009 at 1:11 am
I’ve had pretty good success with forum posting. Although each link has only a small effect an active poster can benefit the sites in his signature quite well.
38 Sameer Arora // Feb 19, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Can anyone advise me of some free ware link submission tool ?
39 fornls // Mar 9, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Oh.. this is even more useful article. I have to try yet so many things mentioned here though I am doing some of them already.
Thanks for giving links to get the list of useful websites..
40 Evan // Mar 16, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Link Building is the hardest part of SEO, getting people to accept your links sometimes proves very difficult, any ideas on how to make it easier?
41 James // Mar 26, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Great set of resources - I think the biggest oversight people make when link building is that quality linking building takes TIME! While all of the above suggestions will in fact get you link, it will take hours upon hours to execute the strategies successfully.
42 Diolt // Apr 25, 2009 at 5:58 am
Linking is one of the most important components of increasing traffic to your web site. Here are 8 simple methods to get links to your site:
Links are a contract term: Any time you sign a contract with a new business partner, include in the agreement a requirement that they must link to your site.
Web based PR: Promote your site using conventional PR! We like to use PRWeb because they are inexpensive, and offer great access to news directories, as well as conventional magazine editors.
Use URL Wire to launch a site: Eric Ward’s URL Wire is a great way to announce the launch of a new site.
Start a Blog: Blogs are a great way to recruit links. Be careful though. Keep the commerciality low. Also, make sure you learn how to use tags, and plug it into Technorati. You can read our article on Blogging SEO tactics for more information.
Ask Visitors to the Site to Link to you: Keep it reasonable. Don’t bury them with the “link to us” message. But if they want to give you a link, make it easy.
Implement RSS feeds: If you have a blog, or publish article regularly, you can syndicate the articles, or synopses of the articles (better) using an RSS feed. This helps increase your exposure. Also, you can submit to 20 or so RSS feed directories, each of which is good for a link.
Submit to Quality Directories: Pick quality directories, such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (ODP), and submit listings to them. There are others that are good too. Best of the Web is also decent.
Ask for Links from other Sites: Make lists of sites that you would like links from. Keep them highly relevant to your business. Contact them and show them why linking to your site would be beneficial to their visitors.
43 excellencetechnologies // May 11, 2009 at 9:07 am
Great set of resource, but do you know of any free tool for multiple submissions in directory . Its very difficult to go in each and every directory and make a listing.
My website hummerlimola . com (Hummer Limo LA) needs to have a few backlinks but I am not sure where to start.
44 Ravi // Jul 3, 2009 at 5:59 am
Nice article, but I’m wondering if directories are obsolete now as Google no longer uses them?
45 juan.suarez // Jul 18, 2009 at 4:02 am
I had heard that link exchanging was no longer useful and now with google politics about DoFollow and NoFollow links one has to be very selective, so it can make things a liitle bit more difficult.
46 trrweb // Aug 24, 2009 at 10:42 am
I think link building is becoming harder and harder these days as the links that are obtainable don’t hold much value anymore. Once someone has found a good way of link building, everyone catches on to the idea, then they over use it and abuse it - then the search engines simply mark down its value.
Is link building still as important as it used to be? Or have the days of building links become a thing of the past now?
47 bryan // Oct 27, 2009 at 7:28 am
Excellent ideas. The thing that gets me is how time consuming link building is. Writing articles and going to thousands of directories takes a ton of time. It’s a long process and very monotonous when we need fast results.
48 Aliva // Nov 11, 2009 at 8:40 pm
I look at articles like this - very nice. This article very useful for link building is easy nothing promote traffic. Good information.
49 Ajay Saini // Nov 16, 2009 at 8:15 am
Hi Dear,
Link building are important for Google rankings and website marketing.
50 Charles Montgomery // Nov 25, 2009 at 1:49 am
I think link building is very important when it comes to generating Google ratings. Its also one of the main factors that ill increase traffic to your website.
51 JR // Feb 9, 2010 at 4:10 pm
A great post. Started using that Open Site Explorer the other day - nice resource!
52 ronak // Feb 10, 2010 at 11:33 am
A great post. Started using that Open Site Explorer the other day - nice resource!
53 kbeus21 // Feb 16, 2010 at 3:32 pm
You have a very nice list here. I also have found that searching Google for a do follow blog directory to be quite useful. I will try the directorycritic.com I think anyway thank you.
Kris,
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