December 19th, 2007
by Sunil Setty
One the most important and often overlooked ingredients in creating a successful website is link building; that is getting other websites to link back to yours. Conventional link building techniques have focused on asking for links, trading links and purchasing links off other websites.
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But let’s look at some quick ways you can get links back to your website for free without too much trouble and without begging.
1. Aboutus/Wikipedia – If the site hasn’t already been included in AboutUs, just add you site information and you are set. Wikipedia gets a bit more trickier. See if you can post a link back to your site on your niche’s wiki page. More than likely it will get removed, but keep trying and maybe it will stick eventually. (Keep in mind that both use “no follow” linking meaning that the PageRank from links will not transfer but you may get some traffic.)
2. Social Tags – Register with sites like de.li.cio.us, StumbleUpon, Myspace, and Technorati, create your profile, add your links, repeat.
3. Squidoo/Hubpages – Both Sqiudoo and Hubpages are similar in that you can freely set up a page on just about any niche. Add plenty of links, text and presto, a page about your site!
4. Comment Spam – As the name implies, the practice is rather spammy, but it can be effective. Basically, look for high profile blogs and leave comments relevant to their posts making sure to include a link back your website in your name or elsewhere. The same applies for guestbooks and shoutboxes like cbox. Again, many blogs use the “no follow” link scheme, so YMMV.
5. Yahoo Answers – Visit Yahoo Answers and if you think you have the answer to some of the queries, then solve the problem making sure of course to include your site link.
6. Become a Reviewer – You don’t need to be Roger Ebert, but if you think you can put a few opinionated sentences together about a product, then visit Amazon, Alexa or Epinions and start leaving reviews. And feel free to include a link to your site while you are at it, too!
6. Forum Links – Pretty straightforward really, and one of the most common ways to get free links these days. Just register at a high PR, high traffic forum(s) and leave on-topic posts that contain backlinks to your website. Usually you can do this in your forum signature without issue, but see if you can get away with it in your main post for an extra traffic boost. Despite the theory that search engines don’t put too much value in forum links, it may be worth a try. And if you ever wanted to get backlinks from .edu sites, Google for some educational forums and see what turns up. Google Groups is another place to check out.
7. Learn to Digg – Much in the same way as comment spam, find high PR pages on Digg where you can leave your comments and a link. In addition to search engine benefits, you may notice a few extra visitors. And be sure to submit your own stories to Digg complete with an eye-grabbing “shock” title.
8. Create a Blog – No, not a blog on your own website, but register for a free blog on a provider like Blogger or Wordpress. Create an account, a profile, etc., and write a few unique posts every now and then, making sure to include a backlink to your site in the text somewhere.
9. Article Creation – There are seemingly thousands of article directories out there, so why not send them your story. Write a few articles on your niche or website – they need not be Shakespeare – and submit them to a few of the top article sites like GoArticles or ArticleCity.
10. Directory Submission – The old standby. Google for any directories in your niche, and submit your site to any that you find worthy. Many are free and they can be a bit spammy, so be sure to investigate them fully before joining their neighborhood.
And that’s just ten tips of a zillion ways to accumulate links, but these are just a few, free, relatively simple ones that you can use especially if you are just starting out. I admit, many of these tips aren’t going to bring you a pot of gold, but if done right they can give your website a bit of boost in the rankings.
