If one has 2-3 hours a day for link building, what is the best way to use that time: (assuming all are done at least periodically) 1. Entering submissions to free directories, 2. Daily blog entries 3. Ezine article submission 4. Press Releases 5. Social Network Building
Ya, spend 20 minutes on each. If I had to choose one though I would probably go with article submissions. If you were good at link baiting, then social networking would probably be the best though.
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Daily blog entries Ezine article submission Social Network Building Set up a three day rotation and do one each day would be my advice.
Try to do 2 hours of each every week. I also try to spend 2 hours per week adding new 'user focused' content to my site.
My choices are 1. and 5. I think a lot of it is personal preference, including which strategy(-gies) keep you motivated to keep at it.
In my opinion you should try to divi your time in all those areas.. By far if you have the skills and time to write quality articles then I would recommend that as a bigger bang for your time. If submitting to directories try to submit to directories with at least a PR of 1 or higher... Alot of directories have no PR and in my opinion yur wasting your time...
If you do daily blog posting, and you include a few internal links to other posts that you've written, then you'll start to notice some increase in your SERPs, just from that.... not to mention the increase in PR for your internal sites once another pagerank update happens. Article submission is also another fantastic way for backlinks, if you can write well.
In my admittedly limited experience with all of these methods, I've seen the fastest and strongest returns coming from article submissions. Thus, I would concentrate my efforts on that medium if I were forced to select a single method.
Yeh you want to have a bit of everything and keep it all balanced. Out of all of them though if I was to just do one I would opt for adding new and relevant content to your website as if it's good and useful enough then the rest migth follow naturally (meaning extra links from sites linking to decent content and more visitors).