Tuesday 6 December 2011

Traffic Strategy #4: Building Backlink Campaigns

Google measures your websites overall relevancy based on who is linking to you. It’s a way for them to quickly evaluate your website and to connect it with a specific niche market.


Backlinks also count as votes for your website, and the more votes you have, the higher ranking you’ll receive – plus, developing a solid backlink campaign can help you rank for some remarkably competitive keywords that you otherwise might not be able to secure. Plus, when you work towards developing a targeted backlink campaign, your website will not only gain higher positioning, but it will appear more frequently. Search engines determine how relevant your website is not just by the NUMBER of back-links pointing to your website but by WHO is linking to you. This means that not only do you want to focus on building a high number of back-links but that you also want to focus on quality back-links that are housed on authority sites.


This means that you want to do your best to develop back-links on established websites in your niche. These are sites that have been around for quite some time, have developed a following, established a communityand of course, receive a significant amount of traffic each day.


There are many different ways to begin your link building campaign and while many of the traditional strategies can be time consuming, once you have developed a solid back-link structure and begin to increase your search engine positioning, you will be able to easily maintain it.


Search engines love blogs, and back-links posted on authority blog spaces will give you instant search engine "juice", with very little work involved.


When it comes to generating back-links with blogs, you need to:


1) Find blogs that provide a ‘do follow’ (the only kind of blogs where a link back to your site will count as a "vote".)


2) You explore and read the blog and then you make an insightful, useful or relevant comment to the post that is likely to be approved by the blog’s administrator.


3) Include your back-link with relevant anchor text on the blog.


4) Rinse & Repeat
You can also generate a valid backlink by creating your own remotely hosted blog as well.


These sites often have substantial authority with search engines, so they have the potential to provide some of that authority to your own sites.


You also have fewer rules to deal with that you would at a site like Squidoo or an article directory, so you can link to your own site in every post if you wish. You could even link to it multiple times in a single post as long as you don’t go overboard and you provide quality content.


The main requirement most blog hosts have is that you post quality content. They don’t want their sites to turn into massive link farms, and they don’t want to host a bunch of untouched PLR or stolen content.


There are two main blog hosts:


http://www.blogger.com


http://www.wordpress.com


The main difference between Blogger.com and WordPress.com is the fact that Blogger allows affiliate links and WordPress doesn’t. If you host a blog on WordPress.com instead of your own domain, you won’t be able to make any "commercial" posts.


You could link to your own blog, but if you aren’t careful, it could be seen as commercial and be taken down.


Blogger does allow commercial posts, as long as you are careful to post quality content. You want to make sure your blog doesn’t look like a "splog" (spam blog) or it could be taken down.


I advise making a new blog for every main keyword phrase you wish to rank for, and making at least 5-10 posts of at least 200 words on each blog. This way it looks like you are actually contributing real content.


If you create dozens of blogs each with one post, you will probably be flagged.
When generating backlinks from established blogs and authority communities, you can include your back-link within the website URL attached to your post as well as within your actual comment box (if permitted). When creating your back-link, make sure that you use anchor text to describe the website where you are directing people to.


To do this, you need to include a bit of HTML code to create your back-link with anchor text:


<a href=http://yoururlhere.com>your keywords here</a>


You want to make sure that you include relevant keywords within your actual anchor text so that you can rank for specific keywords.


One thing to keep in mind as well is that you should never use keywords that are already a part of your website title or domain name but instead, focus on including keywords that you hope to rank for but are not already optimized or included on your own site.


Action Plan:
Step #1: Download the free Firefox plugin available from SEO Quake and use it to locate blogs that allow back-links (dofollow):


https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/seo-tools


Step #2: Create a keyword swipe file of relevant keywords and phrases relating to your niche market that you can use within your blog comments.
Step #3: Create individual pages on your website that feature high quality content and articles that are likely to attract attention from visitors to the blogs that you post your comments on.
Step #4: Use the free Comment Hut software to pinpoint blogs based on keyword and customized search terms to quickly locate relevant blogs in your niche market (all of which offer do follow back-links)


http://www.CommentHut.com
Build Backlinks From Online Directory Sites:

Directory submissions are probably the most popular method of generating back-links in a short amount of time, however you want the search engines to see a natural pattern of increased back-links to your website rather than an instant flood of irrelevant links pointing to your website.

The best approach to take when building back-links with directory submissions is to gradually increase the number of back-links that are featured within each directly.

In addition, you also want to choose relevant categories to place your website listing in, using targeted keywords in both your listing title and description.

Posting your website to directories can be a time consuming, tedious process, so to save time you could consider using a software program that will submit your website into the major directories while allowing you to customize the description, titles, keywords and anchor text used within your listings.



My favorite product on the marketplace right now is Directory Submitter available at

Brad Callen’s Free Directory Submitter
While Directory Submitter will not automate the entire process of submitting your website into the directories, it will reduce the amount of time it takes to create individual submissions.

This is important because with automated software programs that will mass-submit your website into hundreds, if not thousands of directories, you risk having your website flagged for review by the search engines who see an influx of links pointing to your website in a short amount of time.

Tips:

1) Focus on one-way back-links when submitting to directories. It’s important to have more links coming into your site than going out from your site (internal links should ALWAYS be greater than external links)

2) Make sure that your post is related to the thread you are responding to and that the blog owner will not remove your post, believing it's spam.

3) When submitting your website into online directories ALWAYS choose the category or sub category that is closest to the main directory.

4) When submitting your website into online directories, I recommend focusing only on 75-100 directories, rather than mass-submitting your


website into hundreds of directories. You want to build a large number of quality back links however you don’t want to end up setting off any red flags from the major search engines who discover that your brand new website is suddenly receiving thousands of generic back links.

5) If you choose to manually submit your websites into online directories, consider purchasing a copy of
www.RoboForm.com
to speed up the process. (There is a free version that will work on a trial basis).

6) Make sure that you include a relevant description with each submission, including your primary keywords that are focused on your target market.

7) Avoid keyword stuffing when creating your website’s description.


Directory Resources: Free Directory List - Top 100 Free Web Directories

Niche Directories:
Niche Directories List - 5000 Free & Paid Niche Web Directory Listings




 
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