In this article I am going to tell you everything you need to know on how to get backlinks because backlinks are a crucial way of building your site’s traffic up. Many novices think getting backlinks is all about direct traffic as a result from someone clicking on the actual link. However, that is the wrong way to look at it. When you get many backlinks from reputable sites, it will greatly benefit your ranking in the search engine, so you get most of your traffic from search engines.

In fact, if your website has high ranking in the search engines, people will probably find your website a lot more through a search engine, than through clicking your link on a high trafficked website. However, you must first have high ranking in the search engine and part of getting that, is building many backlinks. Building backlinks is a necessary part of high rankings in a search engine. Without dozens(or even hundreds) of quality backlinks, you will never get high rankings on competitive keywords you really want.

Nofollow and search engines:

Not all backlinks are equal. If the links use the nofollow tag or redirects, like a lot of sites do, they are worthless in the eyes of Google for passing on pagerank. The nofollow tag will be inside the a href tag. A redirect will be in the form of a dynamic url.

The reason why sites use nofollow or redirects is because in Google you give away a certain amount of pagerank through your outlinks on the page. Webmasters want to keep the pagerank flowing to their internal links, to keep those internal pages’ pagerank on their site high. They also don’t want to give their competitors an edge in the search engines by passing on “credit” to them too. So they nofollow everyone else. Most don’t realize that many forums and blog software automatically puts a nofollow in your signature and comment links.

Where to get hundreds of FREE backlinks?

1) Commenting on blogs that are part of the no “nofollow” blogging movement. Hint: This blog is a dofollow blog

2) Forum signatures that don’t have nofollows. Here is a list im keeping of DoFollow Forums

3) Link exchanges

4) Creating a network of your own websites and cross-linking (just make sure each site has different I.P addresses)

5) Submitting to SEO friendly directories

Anchor Text:

The text you use on the clickable link is Anchor text. Search engines use this as a way to rank your site for keywords. A few years ago thousands of people “Google bombed” George Bush’s biography page to the word “miserable failure” through the use of miserable failure as the anchor text. It is advised that when appropriate, mix up the variety of words in your anchor text once in a while. The reason for this is because Google knows that when 3rd parties reference your website, they won’t always use the same anchor text. If you always use the same anchor text Google, may calculate you as trying to artificially manipulating your backlinks.

If your anchor text is your website’s name, it may not be ideal for anchor text. For example, Dollars blog as anchor text isn’t that exciting to the search engines. Not many people search those words. A better choice of anchor text occasionally on my backlinks would be “blogging” or “making money online” or hundreds of other choices that are more popular phrases in the search engines. One problem with directories or link exchanges, you usually have to use your website’s name instead of anchor text.

Google and Pagerank & Link Juice:

As a general rule of thumb, the higher the Google pagerank the more valuable the backlink it will be. Google is the only search engine that weighs in Pagerank, but Google is the most popular search engine on the net, with 90% using it. As a result, it’s worthwhile to use it as a measure of backlink quality. One thing to remember, is if a site has high PR, but a lot of outgoing links on the page, less PR will be passed on per backlink, than if it had only a few outgoing links. This is often coined “link juice”.

One way vs reciprocal links:

One way links, instead of recipricol link exchanges is better seen by Google. I still think link exchanges are a great way to build backlinks and boost your rankings in the beginning, provided the backlinks are from older respected sites. If they are just from other junk or newer sites, then forget wasting your time and try othe ways to backlink build instead.

Link Velocity

You can even start to beat out higher PR sites in the search engines, if you have more backlinks and are more consistent building new ones long term. This is because Google sees a consistent supply of new raw backlinks called “Link velocity”, as a sign of a worthwhile site.

Backlink Relevancy:

Non-relevant website backlinks to your website are not as beneficial as relevant websites. But most important, is just getting the backlinks. Just get as many backlinks as you can, relevant or not. You probably hear a lot of supposed SEO experts saying that you should focus backlinks exclusively on related sites. In a perfect world that would be great, but many relevant sites may be hard to get because of limited websites or because they may be unwilling to do exchanges. It is often easier just to get a ton from unrelated sites and forget about relevancy.

A site getting links from dozens of unrelated sites and linkfarms, will outwin everytime a site getting much fewer and more relevant sites. I used to be concerned about relevancy, but from my own experience, relevancy is not as important as people think. A lot of non-relevant backlinks is always better than very few relevant backlinks. This is just a myth spread by people who are regurgitating it from what they heard someone else say.

Other Tips

Making comments on blogs who don’t follow the “nofollow” movement, is probably the most efficient way to build up a ton of good backlinks. Many of these bloggers also have high PR too. Do a search to find out what bloggers are following the do follow movement.

When signing up to a forum for the purpose of getting backlinks, make sure they don’t put a nofollow tags in signature links. Some forums automatically do this inside signature links, which would make posting there a waste of time. Forums aren’t very high quality backlinks because of the lack of subject focus and the high amounts of internal and outgoing links. However, it’s just another piece in your arsenal to easily get nice anchor text backlinks. Most forums aren’t indexed very well, so you may have to post a few times before even one of the links is picked up.

Creating a network of your own websites and cross-linking is an excellent way to get get backlinks. Make sure they do not share the same C blocks on the I.P address. Google will take notice of what you are doing if you do. Not only will you get direct traffic from each of your sites crosslinking to each other, but you can put those links in high visible spots making them usually more effective then link exchanges with other people.

Directory links can be low or high quality depending on the pagerank and structure of the directory. If you can get a one way link, that would be better than a recipricol exchange in the eyes of the search engines. Some directories use redirects or dynamic URL’s so you won’t get any credit. Don’t even bother submitting to those directories, even if it’s free. Directories are basically worthless if they won’t pass you any pagerank. You will not get any direct traffic benefit from most directories, with the exception of maybe Yahoo and Dmoz.

Getting a backlink from a .gov or .edu site in the past has been seen as more important than other TLDs. More recently, people have said there is no difference between domain TLDs. I tend to agree with that because like reciprocal linking, Google has caught onto people trying to game the search engines by purposely seeking .edu backlinks. To make matters worse, many spammers are using .edu sites. You probably in the long run would get more benefit worrying instead about getting a ton of new backlinks than a lot of time trying to get a few .edu. links.

Backlink abuse:

Google in particular, will factor in a lot about the quality of your backlinks. Rapid increases of backlinks, especially on newer sites, could actually work against your rankings in Google. Slow and steady ong term is the best. The older your site is, the less you have to worry, but you should never make it too unrealistic or else your site MIGHT drop out of the SERPs for a few weeks.

Paying for text link ads:

While building links one by one through the above methods can take you pretty far, buying links is the easiest and may be the only way to get you near the top. There are many webmasters out there that have such old established sites and/or have been buying links for so long, that you have no choice, but to do it yourself too. If you want to reach the top, you have to follow suit and do what they do. I recommend Text-Link-Ads.com to build natural looking links into other people’s websites. These links won’t appear to Google as paid links because they don’t come with any easy identifiable logo that a search engine can identify. Just make sure you don’t buy too many links at once and do not always use the same anchor text, so you can bypass some of the “filters” of Google.