First of all, I want to wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year. I know I am looking forward to making progress in 2007 as I have firmed up my own business plan from what I had been doing in 2006 to improve my online income. One of the things I will be doing is building good ole fashioned, high content, well linked content sites. And that brings me to a subject that relates to that very well – how to get backlinks to your site for targeted traffic.
If you have a website and want to get free organic search engine traffic to it, you need to have backlinks from other websites pointing to your site. Not only do you need the backlinks, but you need those links to be subject relevant to the content on your site. Search Engines are ranking sites and sending traffic based on relevancy now, so you must do whatever possible to get the relevant backilnks pointing to your site.
So how do you do this? Here I will spell out the top four ways I use to get backlinks.
- Article Submission – writing articles is one of the best ways to establish content relevant backlinks to your website. When you write an article and publish that article to an article directory like ezinearticles.com, the directory posts your article on their site for others to read. The article you submitted to the directory should have a bio area where you can describe your site and also provide up to two anchor test links back to your main site, or even better an internal page of your site. Keep in mind that it is better to use anchor text when linking as opposed to just providing a URL to your site’s page.
- Directory Submission – submit your website to online search engine directories like DMOZ.org. Directory submission is often an overlooked tactic by many webmasters when trying to come up with backlinks to their sites. Thats because there are many, many search engine directories and submitting your site to them is a time consuming daunting task that is best left to outsourcing or some type of semi-automation.
- Blog trackbacks and commenting – commenting on other webmaster’s blogs is a good tactic for getting backlinks. But, there are a couple of things to consider. One is that your commenting is not geared towards spamming the blog. There are many tools out there that you can use that automate posting comments to blogs and many times those tools are abused for link spamming. This type of blog posting should be avoided entirely. Another thing to consider is that you need to find blogs to post on that provide similar content to what your site or blog content is about. Remember relevancy?
- Reciprocal Linking – this type of linking has some positives and some negatives depending on your approach. To do reciprocal linking properly, you need to consider only relevant website links whose content matches well with the content on your own site. And the number of links needs to be kept at a minimum. Don’t go out and try to get as many links ans you can and stuff them on your site while not even considering if the link subject matter is relevant or not. Also, avoid using link directories on your site if you can. When you exchange links with another site, the best way to do so is in the form of a published article with anchor text links pointing back to you. The links need to have exposure, so an article or a link on the top page of another site is the best way to go.
Of course there are many other ways of getting backlinks to your sites like press releases and posting in forums. But the above outline my favorite techniques.
To keep it interesting, I will be posting more detail on these techniques one by one in the next few upcoming posts to this blog. In addition, I will provide some review information on some of the tools I use to get backlinks to my own sites – so stay tuned!
To your success and a Happy New Year!
Greg
[tags]backlinks, reciprocal links, targeted traffic, blog comments, press release, article submission, directory submission, search engine, organic search engine traffic[/tags]