Wednesday 6 June 2012

5 Brilliant Ways of Building Backlinks


Building backlinks can be a tedious and a cumbersome job for any and all SEOs and SEMs, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Yes, you’ll probably be resigned on spending a large chunk of your time on this practice, which is basically why a lot of marketers, SEO specialists, blog owners and webmasters  avoid doing it or simply choose to ignore it – a damn shame if you ask me, because backlinking and building backlinks is the backbone of good SEO.

The fact of the matter is that if you choose to ignore the power of backlinks, you’re not only missing out on a large chunk of traffic, you’re also missing out on revenue and maybe even some serious money!

It is downright foolish to ignore SEO, especially backlinking and the importance of inbound links to your content. In my opinion, the reason most bloggers choose to do so is lack of information and not know how to get links to their content.

Here are 5 great ways of getting excellent, powerful backlinks to your content that actually send you traffic back to your blog:

1.  Competitor’s Backlinks

This for me easily has to be one of the best ways of getting good backlinks to your blog – checking what your competition is doing. There are tons of tools that let you do precisely this (a quick Google search on ‘how to check competitor backlinks will bring up quite a few results). One of the good ones out there is Open Site Explorer, worth checking out. The free version of the aforementioned software provides you with information on where the links are coming from, however it would be a far better choice to invest in the premium version which offers you with quite more insight.
Use these tools to find where you competitors are getting that link juice from – a blog, resource page(s), publication, or other websites in your niche perhaps. Get in touch with the authors of those blogs directly, offering them an article that you did, which could be put on their blogs. Don’t ask or beg for links, offer them an incentive or at the very least something in return (in this case, you’re giving them valuable content for their blogs).

2. Be Visitor-Oriented, Instead of being Google-Oriented

This especially holds true after Google’s recent updates to how its search engine functions and indexes pages. Google and its bots are progressively getting smarter, and especially after the ‘Penguin’ update, Google now places special emphasis and focus on quality, valuable content, and has started penalizing ‘over-optimized’ websites.
As a result, Google has now started to rank blogs and websites that provide such valuable and quality content much higher than others, and determine its worth based on how well it serves the people, rather than if it is just built for Google – something that could now get you in some serious hot water, and cost you all of your traffic and revenue.
Yes, links will always be important. However it is also equally important to focus on creating a site filled with content useful, and is valuable to people. Following such a model will always be beneficial to you, especially in the long run, as such websites will almost always be able to withstand any changes that Google may make to its search engine. Also, ‘good’ websites will provide the reader with excellent content, automatically boosting enegagement, traffic, the time someone spends on your website, and above all, useful content will automatically be shared by people.

3. Guest Posting

Guest posting on good on  many levels: it gets you more traffic (obvious), it is good for exposure and recognition, and allow you to build free links. If you guest blog somewhere regularly, you can easily build links consistently, even to your old articles.
Guest blogging on more than one blog, especially high-PR, authority blogs, get you invaluable link-juice. Inbound links from these authority blogs will most certainly make Google sit up and take notice. Do this on a consistent basis and you’ll soon build up an invaluable network of backlinks on these blog, linking to your new as well as old content.

4. Roundups

A roundup is an all-inclusive and exhaustive collection of articles, resources, products and services that covers one topic extensively. It could be a 101, a guide or anything else – it has to be really extensive. Add links to these roundups, which would mean that you are linking out to hundreds of people – most of whom are likely to link back to you as well (or at the very least, share your post on social mediums), giving you many valuable backlinks easily!
Furthermore, these sorts of posts will also get a lot of visits, as they tend to provide a lot people with solutions to their problems, all in one single place. People will also share, and maybe even bookmark these posts for later referral.

5. Creating a Blog that Looks Good

Ask yourself this: what are your own chances of staying on a blog for a long time if it looks beautiful (and maybe sharing the content), rather than staying on a blog which doesn’t looks good at all?
While it may not be the most important factor when it comes to building backlinks, having an attractive-looking blog, which looks good, certainly does play an important role here. It is good for conversions, it increases the chances that people will respond to your CTA, it will help reduce your bounce rate, and above all, it encourages people to read the content of your blog.
What’s the use of all the backlinks and traffic in the world, of people aren’t staying on your blog for a very long period of time? Because even if you are getting a lot of inbound traffic, a high-bounce rate would do your blog no good. You want people to stick around and read your stuff.
In addition, it has also been proven by research that people tend to trust well-designed blogs more than poorly-designed ones. Trust worthy blogs will automatically generate more links, and more people will share them within their social circles.
As far as actual backlinking is concerned, many websites on the internet let you submit well-designed websites (or their logos), and get backlinks for it. Plus, an attractive blog might even have someone do an article on it and use your blog as a case-study!

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