The Ten Commandments of Link Building

Published On November 10, 2007
69 Comments Leave a Comment

Ten Commandments of Link BuildingWhen considering the inbound links to your website, you just can’t get enough of them. Getting people to link to your website isn’t easy but that’s the only way to get traffic and of course, the moolah! Webmasters and bloggers know many ways to build incoming links and use them daily to acquire more and more links.

After careful examination, I have consolidated ten most popular link building techniques into a list and here they are, for your reading pleasure!

1. Link Exchange

The most widely used and predominant link building technique is the exchange of links with other like-minded websites. This can be done through one-way link exchange, reciprocal link exchange or a clever three-way link exchange. One way link exchanges are hard to do as it only requires the target website to link back to you. People will only link to your website if they are paid or in lieu of any other incentive.

Reciprocal link exchanges are easy because you are also putting the target website’s link on your website, therefore, the give and take rule applies here.

Finally, there is the little known three-way link exchange technique. Let me give you an example of how its done. Say, you own websites “A” & “B” and want good inbound links for website “A”. You go out and do a three-way link exchange with a webmaster who owns the website “C”. When doing the exchange, you put C’s link on your website “B” (instead of putting it on website “A”), and C puts “A” link on their website. So, you are basically gaining one way link for your website “A” without losing any Page value.

In order to initiate a link exchange, you will have to contact a website’s administrator by sending an email stating what you want to do. Make sure your e-mail is courteous and you explain what benefit the other website will get out of the link exchange. You can also try visiting different webmaster forums where you can find many people wanting to do link exchanges.

2. Social Bookmarking Websites

With the introduction of social bookmarking websites like Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Redditt, Digg etc., getting targetted traffic to your website is easier than before. People will bookmark your website if it is useful to them and has good content. Every person who bookmarks your website helps you in getting an incoming link.

You can link to the bookmarking sites so that its easy for your visitors to bookmark your website. WordPress users can even download plugins which automatically put bookmarking links under your individual posts. Once someone bookmarks your website, there are chances that he will return back to your website sometime later. He might even share that bookmark with his friends/family which can get you more visitors.


3. Link Baiting

This is the most organic way of getting unlimited backlinks. Link baiting basically means offering some kind of unique content (bait) to your visitors and in turn they link back to your website. For example, ebooks, templates, custom scripts, custom graphics etc. I guess you get the idea. You can insert your website’s link in that content and as long as that content holds value and is available on your website, it is certain that people will use it and link back to you automatically. It will have a lasting effect for your website’s pagerank.

4. Web Directory Submissions

There are hundreds and thousands of online web based directories which list websites classifying them into categories. You can perhaps find lists of directories if you search on Google.com. You can submit your website’s URL to them and depending on your website quality, it will be accepted. Paid directories also exist where you have to pay an annual fee to enlist your website.

Make sure that you do slow and continous submissions to these directories to avoid penalization from search engines. Submitting your site to these directories can gain you quick backlinks and give some boost to your pagerank also.

5. Article Submissions

Depending on the niche of your website, you can write quality aritcles and submit them to various free article directories on the Internet. Article directories allow you to put link back to your website in the author resource box so that will give you backlinks and traffic too. If people like your article, they might even directly link to it.

6. Press Releases

Another effective way to spread the buzz about your website is by doing press releases. You can write press releases about your website or a particular section and submit them to press release distribution services such as clickpress, webwire, businesswire, openpress etc.

7. Blog Commenting

When you are visiting other people’s blogs, you can leave comments on their posts. Some bloggers allow you to put your website’s link along with the comments which can help you build links. Sometimes, the link that you put will have a nofollow tag attached to it which will not give any pagerank value to your website, but it can still send some extra visitors.

8. Forum Posts

Try and become a member of all the popular forums that are related to your website’s topic. Most of the forums will allow a certain number of links which can be added to your signature below every post you make. You can add your website(s) link(s) there and build backlinks.

9. Link Programs

There are various link programs which you can join for link development purpose. These programs have a lot of listed subscribers and your links are rotated on their websites which help you get visitors. Most of the time, these programs will tell you to put a piece of code on your website to allow other people’s links.

10. Creating Contests

Last but not the least, a viral way to make good backlinks is to hold a number of contests on your website. You can even offer a small amount of money for the winner of the contest. If money is short, then you could offer something else that is readily available with you as the prize. You can then ask people to link back to your contest and this will get you some quality one-way links.

Concludingly, I will say that these are some good ways to build links but if you are creative and exercise those extra cells of yours, you might come up with something that can really boost your incoming links.

Please DIGG the story if you like it!

69 replies on “The Ten Commandments of Link Building”

Hulda Reply

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Online Universities in USA Reply

Nice written.. all important content about the SMO… for generate a great traffic for better achievement.
KEEP IT UP!! 🙂

Regards
Prem – SEO Executive

Inspirational Quotes Reply

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Alexis Reply

Thanks for the generous information 🙂 Very useful information since I just launched my website less than a month ago!

affordable web services Reply

What happens to all those Wavers that think [a]Getting Links = SEO[/a] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in many ways? Wavers built their fortunes on “links=seo”. When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

Dwayne Reply

Learning about different types of links is a very important process of link building. The more you know about running a successful link building campaign the better off you will be as a webmaster. Thanks for the article!

Link building service Reply

Submitting to web directories is a vital part of every successful link building strategy. Apart from driving traffic to your website through direct referrals, web directories provide static, one-way links to your site, boosting your link popularity and improving your rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Extenze Reply

Thanks Jai. We’re always looking to stay ahead of our competition, and these look like some great ideas. We normally only advertise Extenze through TV advertising, which many people have seen already, but now we’re realizing the importance of good visibility online.

Thank you for the excellent tips!!

Katy Alabaster
ExtenZeforMen.com

Increase Sperm Reply

Hey! Thanks for the great tips. We are trying to get people to our male reproductive health site, and I think that all your ideas are solid ways to do just that.
Sounds like a lot of work, too, but I guess that’s the point. If it were easy, everyone would do it!

Thanks!

1 T-shirts World Reply

Thanks again Jai, I have been following your posts since the first day I set up my site and I have been able to cook up some traffic following your SEO recipe and is now working on link building. You’re always the best SEO guru! Love~

Team Nirvana Reply

Very valuable set of instructions for new bloggers like me. Thanks for sharing this in detail,but, yet keeping it short.

Thank you very much.

abdfatah belajar seo Reply

linkbuilding? with nofollow or dofollow? this blog dofollow or not? how to check it do follow or not?

Polly Reply

Hi, like this article..some really useful advice on here. Can you give any advice on what you think the best blogging tools are…? I run a small business and need something that is easy to use, maintain and not too time consuming !

Link Builder Reply

Good job! You do have great talent in writing.
link building is surely a big lift in generating traffic on your site. Though link building is time consuming but in return you’ll have many ways on how to promote your company or products.

V Reply

These link building techniques do help but are not that easy to go on with.
Still following one of yours tip and the most common one.
Nice Post.

eko Reply

yes… I guess this 10 commandments will be a good parameters for those who want to get as many backlinks as they want. However, sometimes, google said that paid links couldn’t do much favor for the PR, but inspite of paying for a link I guess creating unique contents would work.
perhaps you don’t mind if visiting my new blog @ www.get-reviewed.com which uses free theme from you Bob, thanks anyway. And as I promised earlier, you’re in the first place who get-reviewed.

just my 2 cents

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Fluid Reply

First off, I just want to let you know that this is a very nice looking site. Great job on the design!

Thanks for providing the helpful information. I’ll be coming back to this blog for sure.

Roobedoo Reply

Nice article thanks. I have used quite a few of these already and it is starting to pay dividend, but I will defo start on the rest.

Nathan Ketsdever Reply

Online networking on sites like Facebook and
real-life networking at events like Podcamp and Barcamp and Blogger Meetups are criticial too.

Ainuddin Reply

Correction: Should be “debt free” not “free debt”.
I know many financial institutions buy debts but I don’t think anybody want free debt. Sorry.

Ainuddin Reply

“Article Submissions” is the best part of your post because I strongly believe that it is the best method to get one-way links.
Since I’m getting thousands of incoming links from articles I had written I managed to get high ranking (among top 50 – ranked by Google) for a number of my websites for highly competitive keywords of “free debt”, “digital products” and many others. Posts to forums? I hate to see those “Good stuffs there!” and similar types of spamming posts just to get incoming links.

web hosting review Reply

I thought only “unique content” is called Link Baiting. I did not know custom script, graphic, and template are also part of link baiting strategy.

thanks for the share

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