Link Building - 5 Ways To Get Back Links To Your Site

Published September 26th, 2008

Link building is an essential process when it comes to search engine optimization. It is the single most important factor that will determine your organic search rankings. The links that you can get should be relevant to your site and do remember to use keyword-optimized anchor text for the links.

With extensive link building, you can outrank your competitors for key phrases and keywords that are related to your business. In this article, I will highlight 5 effective ways to get back links to your site:

1. Write quality content. With quality content, your website will become a link bait. Other webmasters will want to link to your site so that they can provide quality content to their readers too. However, when you are creating the content for your site, make sure that they are unique. Because search engines will penalize websites with duplicate content.

2. Directory submission. Directories are great places to get one-way backlinks. Although this method is very time-consuming, it is definitely worth the effort if you have a list of quality directories. You might also want to look into niche directory submission. These niche directories will provide relevant backlinks which will greatly help improve your organic search rankings. However, if you do not have the time to do it, you can always outsource this task to freelances. There are a lot of people offering directory submission service on the Internet. Just make sure that you find a reliable vendor who does manual directory submission.

3. Article submission. Sometimes also known as article marketing, it is where you write articles and submit them to the various article directories on the Internet. Write a good author resource box and include at least a keyword-optimized anchor text link back to your site. When done right, article marketing is a great way to build quality backlinks. If you are not a writer, you can always outsource article writing to professional writers.

4. Participate in social networking sites. Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, Friendster, and YouTube are popular sites that you can get some link juices from. Although it may take up a bit of effort to participate in these social networking sites, I think it is worthwhile if it helps improve your search rankings.

5. Forum marketing. You should join forums which are related to what you are offering and participate actively there. Through forums, you can build backlinks and also not forgetting the quality traffic that forums will bring if you establish yourself as an authority figure.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEO Singapore services.