How to Get Backlinks that Increase Your Rank
Posted by Ben Sibley on Nov 7, 2011 | 49 commentsHow do I get backlinks to my site?
There are tons of ways to easily get quality backlinks to your website. You don’t need to resort to spammy black-hat methods or uber-complex linking schemes.
Smart linking and some elbow grease will get you where you need to be in the SERPs. Try to…
- Diversify your links
- Focus on Quality over Quantity
- Build DoFollow links
- Automate with SEO Accessories
- Vary your anchor text
There are many ways to approach your link building. You’ll want to build links that are both relevant and authoritative. I have constructed below a system to define the method of link building necessary to further your campaign based on your needs.
The link building methods are labeled with a symbol system as follows:
| These are links that often pass PageRank or authority |
 | These are links that are easily made very relevant to your page |
 | These are links that can effectively send traffic |
| These are links that usually pass a lot of trust |
| These are techniques that you can use to build deep links |
How to Get Backlinks
Here are 9 distinct strategies to get backlinks free. Each is labeled according to it’s strengths and explained in detail below:
Article Marketing |
| Overview: Article Marketing is the submission of articles to article directories with the hopes of syndication on other relevant non-directory sites. Typically, you won’t receive much PR from AM because articles are submitted on large directories and only sometimes syndicated to sites besides scrapers. Article marketing is best used to get very relevant, anchor text links to deep pages in your site, and even send some traffic too. |
| For Relevance: To get more relevance out of your links, make sure to optimize all of the on-page factors you have control over. Put your keyword in the title of the article and begin the article with your keyword if you can for greater weight. Also, make sure to use your keyword and relevant terms in the body of the article. Finally, use exact match or partial match in your anchor text for best results. |
For Traffic: To increase the amount of traffic you get from your articles, use one link for SEO in your resource box and make the other one a call-to-action. In other words, use proper anchor text for one link, and a “click here…” type link for the other. Also, let your article flow into your resource box before concluding to get more eyes on your links.
Resources:
-> Article Marketing Robot Review
Blog Commenting |
| Overview: Blog commenting is a really versatile and effective means of link building. While you can drive traffic with blog comments, they’re best suited for getting PR and relevant links to deep pages on your site. |
| For Authority: To find high PR pages to comment on you can use search strings in Google to find KeywordLuv blogs and sort them by PR with SEO Quake (See strategy below). |
For Relevance: When searching for blogs to comment on, the first results in the SERPs will always be the most relevant. You can comment on these and use your keyword as anchor text for a stronger link. Also, you can use relevant terms in your comment to further increase the relevance of that page.
Resources:
Guest Blogging |
| Overview: Guest blogging is an all-inclusive means of link building. It involves finding blogs in your niche to post on and writing unique, quality content for them. Guest blogging provides you with the opportunity to send traffic and get great links from sites that are potentially very authoritative and trusted as well. |
| For Authority: How much authority your links send back to your site depends on where you guest post. You can pick out sites that have a high PR to write for to get backlinks with more PageRank |
For Traffic: To drive more traffic from each of your posts, add a benefit or incentive to your links. A call to action or well structured link will help you get more click-throughs.
For Relevance: Guest posts don’t always need to target a keyword, and I don’t recommend targeting the same keyword you’re trying to rank for on another blog – that’s counter-productive. Instead, write posts that are on a very similar subject and use similar terminology.
For Trust: Similarly to guest blogging for PR, you can find old and trusted sites to write for. To evaluate a site, check out how long it’s been around, how many pages it has, how many links it has, and how much search traffic it gets (use SEMRUSH).
Resources:
-> Guest Blogging Master – The Complete Guest Blogging Guide
| Directory Submission |
| Overview: Directory Submission can be used to get a few authoritative and trusted links to your site’s homepage. The trick is to not be spammy and only submit your site to trusted directories like Dmoz. |
| For Authority: To get authority, find small niche directories. Often times, these will be very specific or even just be a links page on a site. These pages sometimes have a good amount of PR. |
For Trust: There are a few extremely well trusted directories you can submit to. Dmoz is free, but you should also consider Best of the Web and the Yahoo Site Directory even though they are a bit pricey.
Resources:
-> Link Building with Directories Guide
| Forum Posting |
| Overview: Forum posting is a social activity. These links aren’t strong and authoritative, but they are great for driving targeted traffic, sometimes for long periods of time. |
| For Traffic: The best way to drive traffic with your forum comments is to comment on very popular threads that will get a lot more views or answer questions. You can link in your post to relevant posts of yours and/or you can link back to your site or some posts in your signature. Forum posting is also great for reputation development and brand awareness. |
Resources:
| Social Sites |
| Overview: There are many different types of social sites. While none of them help build particularly strong links, they can be a great source of targeted traffic. |
| For Traffic: Obviously there is Twitter and Facebook, but besides them there are tons of social bookmarking and news sites. These sites allow you to quickly submit a link with a relevant description and tags. For social bookmarking I recommend using OnlyWire. |
Resources:
-> OnlyWire Account Creator Download
| Press Release |
| Overview: Press Releases can be useful for sending traffic and gaining authoritative links. However, this greatly depends on your distribution channel and how news-worthy your release is. |
| For Authority: In order to gain authority from your press release, it will have to be syndicated on more popular websites. Services like PRWeb can help to get your PRs found by news sites. |
For Traffic: Like with AM or GB, make sure your links are relevant and include a deep link inside the body of the content if possible.
For Relevance: Again like AM and GB, use your title and relevant terms smartly to increase the relevance of your press release page and links.
Resources:
| Q & A Sites |
| Overview: Question and Answer Sites provide a good opportunity to display your knowledge and authority on a subject and drive targeted traffic. |
| For Traffic: The links from Q & A sites aren’t very strong and are usually nofollow. However, they can be a good source of traffic. Just a couple minutes a day on sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers can provide you with a growing stream of traffic. Also, YA often ends up in the SERPs. Answering just one question can provide you with a new traffic stream from the search engines. |
Resources:
| Free Hosted Blogs |
| Overview: Free blogs have been spammed like crazy, but you can still use them for creating relevant, traffic sending links. They’re great to use because of the freedom and control you have over the link building. |
| For Relevance: To create a relevant webpage from a free blog, make sure to optimize the URL and title of the page. You can then add a few articles that target a different term related to your keyword phrase. Also, you can get backlinks with any anchor text you want to any pages you want. |
For Traffic: Add some links in-content for SEO purposes and other with a call to action made to drive human traffic. Also, you might be able to rank the web property for a low competition keyword and get search engine traffic to it that will convert well to your site.
Resources:
These 9 techniques on how to get Google backlinks to your site are enough to help you rank for any keyword you want. You can refer to this list whenever you have a specific need to fulfill.
For instance, if your page already has decent PR and you need some more really relevant links, article marketing and free blogs would be a good solution.
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Hi Ben, what a great idea for an article. I’ve seen many articles similar to this but what makes your article stand out is you’re actually letting the reader know what method of building backlinks is going to me most affective, most quality, targeted and so much more.
The Legend was a little hard to follow seeing I found myself scrolling up and down trying to remember what images meant what but overall the article was spot on and I enjoyed it a lot.
bbrian017 recently posted..$1000 Blog Engage Best Guest Blogging Contest
Thanks Brian, this post was actually something I had sorted out for myself, so I figured why not organize it and put it up for everyone. I tried to do my best with the symbols, looks like something to work on for next time
Ben Jackson recently posted..SEO Writing: 6 Step Content Copywriting for the Search Engines
Hi there Ben,
This is really quite a comprehensive post on the different ways of link building. I really liked the way you have differentiated the advantages of different methods through the help of symbols, that was quite innovative as well as informative.
Shiva recently posted..Top Best Free and Premium WordPress Popup Plugins
Hey thanks for stopping by Shiva, glad you enjoyed the post!
Ben Jackson recently posted..SEO Writing: 6 Step Content Copywriting for the Search Engines
Hey Ben. This was a really good read, found it whilst browsing the Warrior Forums. Out of all of those, I really enjoy blog commenting the most; it allows us ‘true’ bloggers to get together. What ruin’s it for me is the tacky spam some visitors leave just to get their site recognised. They have to realise posts that have no quality or meaningfulness will only get deleted anyway so why do it.
Nathan recently posted..How You Can Use Post URL’s To Improve Blogspot SEO
Absolutely, spamming comments is a waste of time in my mind. Even if you’re doing commenting for link building and not out of genuine interest, you’ll never get approved without providing some value (or at least not being an obvious spammer
)
Ben Jackson recently posted..SEO Writing: 6 Step Content Copywriting for the Search Engines
Hi Ben! Great article again! Can you suggest a good site where I can do multiple page rank check? I’ve been searching from your site but I’m not you mentioned it and I can’t find any.
Thanks, I usually only need to check one page at a time and use an add-on bar or SEO Quake. If I need to check a long list of sites PR I use Scrapebox. That’s a bit of an investment just for a PR checker, but it’s a great tool regardless.
Ben Jackson recently posted..How to Get Backlinks that Increase Your Rank
Excellent post! Probably the best I’ve seen with examples and links to them. Very nicely done.
Great article! I have bookmarked your site and will visit often!
thanks for sharing! useful for me!
This is really useful…thanks for sharing these info…cheers…
Ricci Sionil recently posted..Electrician Whetstone London
Wow Ben! I always like to use various keyword as my anchor text.
Joseph recently posted..How To Make Money Online Creating Video Games
Hi, I found you on comluv and clicked here after I read your article about commenting for traffic and seo. I loved this article as well. It’s very detailed and very helpful to me. I’ve tried numerous times to submit my blogs to dmoz, but no luck so far. Any tips you have on getting them accepted will be highly appreciated.
Thanks for a very helpful article. I’ve learned a lot from it.
Anne Lyken-Garner recently posted..How To Paint A Room
Hmm Dmoz is a real bore lol, my advice is to just follow their guidelines to submit properly and play the ole waiting game. I submitted this site about 6 months ago, probably about time to do that again
As for small niche directories/resource pages – those just require an email or two and can be pretty helpful for rankings as well.
Thank you, Ben. I’ll do just that.
Anne Lyken-Garner recently posted..How To Make A Fabric Picture
Thanks, Ben!
For organized post for link building the right way.
What do you think carries more link juice – commenting on a PR4 blog with little relevance or commenting on PR1 but relevant your blog? Lets assume both allow keyword do follow links.
Julie recently posted..Top 10 Mistakes Made by Student Travelers
Hi Julie, that’s a hard question to answer – there are a lot of variables to consider. I couldn’t say for sure, but I would evaluate these links based on…
1. PageRank passed – the PR matters but it’s more important to know roughly how much you’ll get from YOUR link…
PR passed is the PR of the page divided by all links on the page and then subtracted 10-15% due to PR decay (to prevent infinite PR and weird stuff from happening). So a link from a PR 1 page with 50 total links (OBL + IBL) would be twice as powerful as a link from a PR 1 page with 100 links.
Another important factor: Due to the log scale that PageRank is calculated on, each point is actually 8.5x more valuable than the last. That’s why a PR 4 is a heck of a lot better than a PR 1.
2. Relevance – a link can be relevant in many different ways. Factors to consider:
URL of the linking page
Title of the linking page
Anchor text of your link
Text surrounding your link
Placement of your link on the page
The takeaway: I would try to avoid getting completely irrelevant links to your page just because they have PR. Instead, try to build very relevant and authoritative links (sacrificing a bit of one or the other where necessary).
Ben Jackson recently posted..1,000+ Easy Backlinks: FREE, Simple, & Effective
It was nice reading your post since you have included labels and symbols and it looked very organized which has helped us readers see the strength of the link building strategy. I’m now currently working on my hubs and lenses which I think helped me to gain traffic this past week. Also, I’m planning for a PR which will cost me some. Anyways, very organized and well written article. Keep it up.
Juphet Mislang recently posted..SEO Company Revisits You Tube Search Stories Video Creator
I was your article and I would say I’m very impress you catch my attention and answered my thoughts about some SEO.
Thanks i just got an idea to promote my site.
Jeriea Smith recently posted..how to Challange Your negative core belief by experiment
Good read. Although article marketing has taken quite a hit in recent times and is not as effective as it was once before but still has its uses for most bloggers and marketers. Guest blogging and blog commenting are of my two most used methods when it comes to building backlinks, so far both have proven to be very effective.
Well written. It made easier for me to classify the link building strategy I’m doing. It helped me determine what strategy should I focus on doing. Thanks Ben, your great!
Hi Ben, I found your site on ComLuv’s search engine and glad I did. I’m still figuring out how SEO works. ComLuv seems like an opportunity to make anchor texts, almost like guest posting. But reading your article, I suspect I should be more strategic about content.
Astro Gremlin recently posted..Train to Be a Secret Agent in Your Own Home
I haven’t tried the CL search engine yet – thanks for letting me know how you got here! CL is definitely a great opportunity for building links and driving traffic, but yes you should definitely use more content-rich linking methods as well such as article marketing, press releases, and guest blogging.
Ben Jackson recently posted..12 SEO Experts to Follow in 2012
I try link wheel and I think they work perfectly for me.
Alvin recently posted..Cheap Web Hosting Kenya
Hi
There are diffrent ways to approch back link that increase the rank. This is the easy one to approch this. I like this method. Befor read this blog, we don,t know about this method.
THANKS,
Jac Evans recently posted..No Posts Were Found!
Hi Ben
Thank you for having this kind of post here. It really am a very wonderful review that really make us understand what how and what SEO page is for. Reading your post gives me an Idea that I’m on the right track in pushing my website to Search Engine. All these off page strategy is very useful we know how and where best apply it.
JM
Jac Morton recently posted..St. Lucia All Inclusive Honeymoon
Great work on this, Ben. I’ve been growing businesses for a while, and have relied on various specialized consultants for a long time. This sort of conceptualization goes a long way to helping me be a better consumer of their services, and even a skilled DIYer! Thanks.
Hey glad you liked it Mike. I think when it comes to SEO there is a big initial learning curve, but once you have the basics down it gets much easier. Should make it easier to get more out of your consultants, or like you said, start calling the shots
SEO work is progressing very fastly. We can increase our rank by getting the back-link. Google has changed his method. We can increase our rank by using description.
Alex Brad recently posted..Extermination is the Key When it Comes to Biting Bugs in the Home
These are very helpful tips. Backlinking is a challenge sometimes.
Nice article. I am trying to write a film blog but I never knew how much SEO was needed for readership. Good advice. Thanks.
Conley recently posted..BEST NINETIES FILMS (1)
All the features are really very usefull but Diversify your links can make the backlinks only very fastly..i always use this method for the backlinks..
Backlinks are the greatest and fastest source to increase your ranks within a few days only i only use this method for the purpose of increasing the ranks of mine sites….
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