Software is definitely the way to get penalized. Google has made several algorithmic changes over the past couple years just to catch this sort of shortcut technique.
Forums are a good way to generate backlinks, but search engines absolutely love blogs. Type anything in a search bar and you will see a forum show up at the top from time to time, depending on your search, but blogs will almost always be there.
Yeah blogs are the way to go. Check out Quick Sprouts SEO guide. That things is massive and the back link section is quite thorough. Overall blogs are the way to go, but a mix is always needed. Just try to see what people in your niche are up to and what comes in the SERPs.
Is there a way to find high PR sites in a particular niche, besides manually looking at one site at a time? Real Estate is my niche.
Social interactions are the true long term strategy to link building. If you can build a community/tribe around your niche, your are setting your back-link campaign up for auto pilot. Hope this make sense.
Hi Danielle, Don't take this personally because it's a mistake many people that are new to SEO make. Backlinks are great when it comes to ranking but at the end of the day they drive very little traffic in themselves as a percentage of whats out there and traffic is what you want. Yes, you can get organic traffic from the SERP's but by leaving all your eggs in one basket, you could be in big trouble if you get hit by an algorithm update. It's really a chicken and egg situation. By focusing on driving traffic to your website, you will naturally get linked to and these are the best kind of links because they are real links generated by real people. Leave the link building to your traffic. Blog commenting: is something thats worthwhile but I would not get into it just for the links. It's a very good opportunity for raising your brand awareness and communicating with the webmaster indirectly. Once you become a familiar face on their site, there are potential guest posting opportunities. Article Marketing: If you mean the kind of article marketing where you spray the internet indiscriminately with low quality content and to low quality content farms with next to no traffic, don't bother. I'm as black hat as the next guy but this simply does not work on any level. Social Media: social media marketing from a ranking perspective, is a complete myth apart from Google+. What social media do is give you the opportunity to share content. THIS is what drives the traffic to your site and the links that follow this traffic. It's these links that improve ranking, NOT the other way around. Google has never and never will, use a third party algorithm as a ranking factor. Where To get Traffic? This forum thread is a perfect example. It's been viewed 7,500 times (aty the time of posting) by people interested in the topic of backlinks. Thats over seven thousand people who may look at your signature and visit your blog or website, and thats just ONE thread. Threads like this stay indexed indefinitely and will generate a trickle of traffic for years to come. 1. Find out where your potential traffic hangs out, join the conversation, be helpful and where appropriate, direct the conversation to a relevant piece of information on your site. You can find the relevant forums through forum search tools like Boardreader and Omgili to name but two. 2. Write good content that solves specific problems on your site and share it around the web. To find ideas for this content, use Google alerts ands Talkwalker with using your keywords and wild cards like "How * Linkbuilding" or "Is Linkbuilding *" etc. This will return recent discussions you can join and add value to. 3. Try writing helpful articles that solve peoples problems as guests posts on other peoples blogs. Other webmasters are more than happy to let you do this if it adds value to their blog and it will generate a huge amount of traffic to your website via an authors link. There are many ways of finding guest posting opportunities by using the above tools and search strings like, "write for us" SEO, "submit guest post" SEO, "bloggers wanted" etc. You get the idea. Run them through Alexa or put multiple domains through the Alexa tool in scrapebox and pick the ones with the most traffic. It's not unusual for a guest post to get read tens of thousands of times by regular visitors to a blog and that can generate some serious numbers in subscribers and quality backlinks for your blog. I hope this has been of some use to you and please don't go down the road of "Link building" for traffic if you are in this game long term. It will only end in tears. Jack Karter
7500 people may have read the thread. But if they are guests, or not logged in? They will not see any signature files.
Not true. They add value to your site. A link from wikipedia (even though its a no follow) is a HUGE reputation booster.
Hey WebDev - is there a good tutorial on how to use scrapebox? I seem to come up short on it all the time. Thanks, Tip
I would hire someone (SEO) qualified. Quality has more weight now than quantity. There are a lot of people struggling and trying to clean up crappy useless links now. It's going to get even tighter in the future. Google's next change will probably be called....well I better not say.
Got to love all the replies that are useless as can be. Hire seo qualified? Waste of time and money. I do not do blog comments, my forum links are few. I do not buy links, I do not exchange links. I just post on my blog and move on. As I do not care about page rank (traffic is more important than page rank). Facebook is a bit useless, no matter what people say about getting a facebook page, blah blah blah. Twitter is good only if you have real followers who actually will read your tweets and actually click on your links. Otherwise a complete waste of time there.