Backlinking Boot Camp, Effective Link Building Strategies You Need to Know

Step in line and get ready to learn some link building techniques! Before this article is over you will be link building machines and ready to go out there and make your website proud. Your mission is to gain quality backlinks and increase search engine rankings. Your enemy is all the junk websites that won't get you anywhere! Alright, I will stop yelling at you, but let's get this underway, shall we?

What are backlinks?
Backlinks or inlinks are links that are on external websites (websites other than your own) that are pointing to your site. Naturally it's the exchange of information, when one person wants to share something interesting or funny to others and and they link to it. At least that's what it's meant to be on the internet. Obtaining these backlinks are one of the most vital goals you will want to achieve for SEO success.

When you search for a particular keyword why do you see certain sites at the top and others are on page 22? When Google looks at your site as a possible match for this keyword, one of the many things it looks at among others are how many backlinks your site has. If these sites also contain this relevant keyword even better. This is one basis of search results for Google. There are of course a host of other things that are fed into the formula before you see the search results; too many to discuss now.

Why do I want them?
Basically one indicator for a reputable site according to Google is a site that has many other sites linking to it. Therefore, if Google sees tons of links pointing to your site it will think it must be a reputable website. Afterall no one would support a site by linking to it if it was a terrible site. With that reasoning getting a link on a popular site is a major show of support and to Google that's a good mark for your site.

Successful link building will ultimately lead to high traffic and higher search engine results. It may take some time, as with all SEO techniques, you will not see it overnight. But if done correctly you will reap the rewards in the end and receive heaps of traffic from doing things correctly.

What makes a quality backlink?
When doing some link building one high quality backlink can be worth it's weight in gold. That one link will be worth a great deal more than many links on sites that have no worth. Leaving your link just anywhere could actually have a negative effect on what you are trying to do. Consideration should be placed on where you leave your website's link because of this.

Page Rank - Page Rank is Google's way of rating a websites popularity. It's a system from Unranked to 10 with 10 being the highest. A page with a 0 page rank is considered a ranked page. You want to aim for pages for anything over 1 PR. You also want to keep in mind how many links there are on the site itself. If there are a great deal, for instance, like a couple thousand, you won't benefit much from it. The reason being that it is thought search engine crawlers only see the first 100 or so links and disreguard everything else.

Obtaining several high PR links will help tremendously, and usually people are willing to pay money to get them. There are however some free ways to get high PR links absolutely free. If your site is brand new this is also a nice way to help get your page indexed quickly.

EASY ways to get a few high Page Rank inlinks:
1. Write articles and submit them to article directories. - The best one out there is ezinearticles.com currently it's PR is 6. Which means if you write an article for "Top Fishing Spots in Ohio" and someone searches for that, the chances are since Ezinearticle's rank is so high YOUR article will show up twice as fast as it would for your own site. Which your site is most likely is not a PR6 site otherwise you wouldn't be reading this. When someone then clicks on it, they read it and then they see your link at the bottom of the article, giving you more traffic as well.

There are many other great article sites here's my list: Over 20 great sites to submit your articles

2. Create a Google profile and add your links to your bio and your links section. Google Profiles

3. Create a YouTube account and add your link. Better yet, start creating videos and add your link to each one's description, this way you get contextual links.

4. Find a high PR blog and comment frequently, you will be amazed at how many inlinks you will rack up in no time at all. Plus the added benefits of conversing with other bloggers in your niche. Remember, you're not commenting to spam your site but to contribute to the post! In my opinion this is the best method for gaining many inlinks quickly.

5. Just like above another great thing to do is find a high PR forum dedicated to your niche and create posts with your link. Put your link in the signature and in your profile; these all add to your backlinks.

6. Blog Directories. Pick a few of the better ones out there as you will most likely not get any traffic from directories or add much towards your PR. Always be sure to place your blog in the proper directory. Over 25 great sites to submit your blog and get it noticed.

Getting the best kind of backlink:
Another thing that you will want to think about is just how old the site is your adding your link to. While you won't be penalized for having your link on a baby site, the domain's age is greatly appreciated by Google. Getting a link on a one of these "ancient" sites that is in your niche on the main page is the holy grail. So, how the heck do you do that? Lots and lots of hard work and maybe a bit of luck. Here are some practical ideas...

1. Find suitable websites and E-mail the webmaster and give them your pitch, offer anything you can to work out some sort of deal. An effective way to work it out is you do a post for them and they do a post for you. Most of the time this is a long shot but it's worth time to dedicate to doing this. Much time can be wasted getting your links on "junk" websites that could be better served actually conversing with other site owners and trying to promote your blog this way. I'm a firm believer in hard work, nothing easy is worth doing, usually.

2. Paid advertising. In the form of a text link for sale, you will see ads for this but avoid those and try to go to the source with an another E-Mail to the webmaster. Just ask how much would it cost to have a link placed on their site for x amount of time. I don't consider this to be an easy method because you're spending your hard-earned dollars. Only consider this if you have found the "holy grail" of a site I mentioned and the price is right.

3. Paid Blog Directories, many of these since you're paying cold hard cash will usually be worth it for the quality.

4. Of course the obvious technique that I think most people aren't willing to accept: Write amazingly interesting content that the masses want to see. This will naturally spread throughout the internet on its own, the proverbial "If you build it, they will come."

Do Follow Links, What and Why? If you're doing any amount of research on link building you may have heard the term "Do Follow" and "No Follow" thrown around. To put it simply, a Do Follow link is a link that is crawlable by a search engine spider and a No Follow link is one that is essentially invisible to search engines. This is hugely important to understand when link building. So let's look at this further, a No Follow link is one that has HTML code added to it to tell a search engine spider not to see a link. It is commonly used when adding links of non-relevance, paid links, popular links (Google, Facebook, Etc) and blog comments.

A Do Follow link is simply a normal link because normal links are all crawlable, there is no special code to make a link Do Follow.

A No Follow link has this code added to the link's HTML:

rel="nofollow"

As you can see it's very important to find out if your link your adding is going to be a Do Follow. Many bloggers disable the No Follow on their comments so you will get the backlinks others will not. There are lists of Do Follow blogs out there you can visit. But without that you are left to debugging the source code to figure out if it's Do Follow or you can use a browser plug-in.

Social Bookmarking is also regarded as an effective way of gaining backlinks by many. This is my least favorite means of gaining backlinks simply because I haven't seen much benefit. Why? Because they're mostly all No Follow links. unfortunately I have seen many blogs suggesting to submit to these sites for backlinks but in reality they provide no backlink at all. Now, I've seen traffic from them but according to many backlink checkers I am not actually getting one. Use these sites more for promotion more than anything.

Here's a very nice list of bookmarking sites that you can get an actual link from.
Social Bookmarking Sites Which Don’t Use NoFollow : Bookmarks and Search Engines | Search Engine Journal

What we learned
Alright let's see if you passed Link Medic's Backlinking Boot Camp. First we know we need to get our links that are sites that have a high Page Rank, have an aged domain name and are do follow. Next we wanna look at how we're gonna get it there which the best ways are blog commenting and forum posting as well as the popular site's profiles. We also learned that quality far out weighs quantity and all the link building in the world can't beat world-class content.

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