Link building refers to the process of getting external pages to link to your website or a page on your website. Building links is a difficult, time-consuming process. It's also imperative in achieving high organic search rankings. To implement effective link building, it's important to understand why link building is important and how it works. Have a varied anchor text Target your keywords but make very sure to vary the anchor a lot. Even a few “click here†is good to get. Come from related pages This is probably the most important, especially for english web sites. It is commonly believed that links from related pages carries more “weight†(not PR). Come from different locations on the linking pages. Don’t have all the backlinks from footers or any other specific place. Have them on the top of the page, inside the body text, navigation, footer etc. Placed with a gradual natural increase Don’t place hundreds or thousands of links to a new site the first days … I have tested that and gotten the site banned in Google. You need to gradually place the links and the quantity all relates to how much links the site is usually getting. So if a site usually gets 10 new links per week then don’t place 100 suddenly one day. Come from reciprocal linking Reciprocal links are still good but don’t have them as a majority of your backlinks. 3-way-linking is a good alternative but don’t use any patter. Point to internal pages as well as your home page Never underestimate backlinks pointing to your internal pages. As you have your internal pages SEO’d as well, get backlinks to these as well with varied anchor. It is been speculating that the value of these has increased during the BigDaddy update. Come from non-directories A selected few directories such as ODP and Yahoo carries trust in Google from the editorial vote. However, many directories does not give that and I even suspect that having a majority of your backlinks from 200 free general directories even can do harm to your link profile. They can still be good but should just be something extra to the links you already have. Effective ways to get links Link Baiting This is the single most important method. It has mainly to do with good content that gets links the natural way. To keep things simple in this guide I have decided that everything that makes people link to you because of the content on the page/site falls under this category of link baiting. You need to read this post I wrote on link baiting. Comments: Pure white hat, recommended but sadly not very effective if not something real major. Directory submissions/Link Building using directories There are specialized SEOs and Link Builders that are doing directory submissions. There are 4 kinds of directories here: pay-for-inclusion, reciprocal required, free and niche directories. And there are of course specialists in each one of these. There are almost one thousand free SEO friendly general directories, a list of these and a submission service can be seen here. As for placement in reciprocal directories there are both brokers and non-brokers. Comments: Cheap way to get many low quality links. Can take months before effect is seen. Deep links usually not possible. New edit and comment on this: since BigDaddy Google has been smashing and deindexed internal pages on a lot of directories, but the indexed pages still show a PR value even though they are deindexed. Keep this in mind and run a site: command or type the URL of the internal page in Google to see if the directory/page has been hit. Link Exchange, 2 and 3 ways The good old way. I link to you and you link to me. This is more useful if you have 30 or more sites as you can get and provide relevant links. Rule of thumb: you contact people, not the opposite. There are also Reciprocal Link Programs but I don’t recommend that. Comments: Don’t overdue it … High PR-subscriptions (Grey Hat?) You can rent PR 5-9 text links at various places for various prices. Cheap places I had some very good success with: here, here and here. Comments: Don’t get too many high PR links too fast, get relevant if possible. Link-Vault I am myself getting 200 permanent links a day from this program to 40 URLs, all with varied anchor. The links you get from this program are mostly footer links and other low quality links but the program is extremely powerful. Do not, I repeat, do not display Link-Vault ads on your most valuable web sites – that is a red flag, especially since BigDaddy. Comments: Only negative is that the links are mostly footer and the relevancy is not that good, other than that it is great. (Grey Hat) This program gives you a lot of rotating temporary backlinks from mostly footers of sites. I have been using this program successfully to boost SERP ranks in Google, especially at the V7N SEO contest. This program is extremely powerful as well as dangerous and can have your site banned or harmed if you are not careful. My rule of thumb: maximum 5K weight on a single ad. At one moment I had 120K weight and I was getting many many thousands of links to more than 40 ads that I had. Linking from your own web sites This is an excellent way if you have many relevant pages in the same niche. Comments: Don’t interlink all, keep sites on different C-class IPs and avoid patterns. Pay bloggers You can post on the business section of webmaster forums stating that you will pay to get the blogger to blog about and link to your site. Example. Comment: Good to get the word out. The blog post will over time be buried down in the blog structure. Article submission Write an article with links in the article and/or in the resource section to your site. Or pay somone to write these for you. Use specialist (example) to have these submitted to article directories such as this one. Make directories and make the link submitter reciprocal to a site of your choice. I use this on 2 general directories of mine. My directories are free but the link submitter gets his link featured if he reciprocal with my other site. I get about 10 links per week using this. Comments: Irrelevant, certain percantage come from bad neighbourhood and not always from same language. Write testimonials and reviews Write and send a testimonial to your web host, web designer, web developer and SEO. They probably publish it at their site and if you are lucky they link to you as well. Send a review to your favorite sites and have your name and link at the bottom of it. Comments: Time consuming … Links under articles This is a new method I developed myself, here. In the future I think more will start to use this as well. It enables to link builder to exactly specify which articles, the anchor and the URL of each link. Good for deep pages.
That's great info but generating backlink getting tougher and tougher. which is the most effective method?
We should not get paid links because now Google are considering as a spam website which are getting paid links.
Thanks for sharing such a useful information about link building. After coming Google Penguin Update, now the linking becomes very natural.
Sounds like you still have a lot of energy and enthusiasm towards link building. I too was like this once, but decided to outsource most of my link building. Link building is extremely tedious and frustrating. Anyhow, thank you so much for the awesome list of ways to build backlinks. It has got me a bit excited about SEO once again.