Let’s suppose you have a big site launch coming up, or your boss has asked you to begin marketing one of the company’s sites. You know you’ll need to build a ton of links, so you get to work on some research. And behold, you find several sites will to build 1,000 “high-quality” links to your website for the low price of $19.95. Sounds like quite a deal, right? You go out of pocket for those 1,000 links, and sit back waiting for all that juice to come flowing to your site. You’ll be ranking number one in the SERPs in no time.

If that scenario sounds familiar, you might have a few things to learn about link building. Sure, you’ll probably get those 1,000 links as promised. But where will they come from? If you’re lucky, they’ll be generated by an army of robots spamming blog comments and forums for a handful of no-follow, no-worth links. If you’re unlucky, they’ll come from banned or bad neighborhood link farms, and you’ll have a bit of explaining to do when your company’s site gets penalized by search engines.

Good Links are Hard to Find

It’s natural to go after the low-hanging fruit links, the ones that you can just buy and watch flow in. And don’t think for a second that Google isn’t on to the idea. When a page of your site gets a link from another high quality site, Google thinks of the link as a vote. The site, in essence, has voted for your site as being a relevant source of information for [insert anchor text]. For example, I might link out to a site using an anchor text like wireless internet review, which means that I’m actually saying the page I’m linking to is a good source for information on, you guessed it, wireless internet reviews.

But links get a little more complicated. Think of every link as having two parts of value that it can pass — juice and anchor text. To keep things simple, a link passing juice means that it’s not redirected, it’s not marked with a no-follow attribute within the code, and it passes general value to a site, independent of the anchor text. This is why, in some cases, getting a link with the anchor text “click here” or even “this site” can still be valuable, depending on the source.

On the other hand, links pass anchor text, sometimes even independently of juice. In this way, solid link building campaigns can include some no-follow links that, once again depending on the quality of the source, could still pass some keyword value. But all the technical stuff aside, good links are hard to find because they are:

• imbed within relevant and well-written content
• coming from a site with authority and value
• actually seen (meaning the page on which the link appears does get traffic)
• relevant on both ends

If both the linking site and the site receiving the link share the same niche, there’s a good chance that the link anchor text will seem relevant to both sites. In some industries, you’re going to have a very hard time convincing potential competitors to promote your sites. But in most others, you just have to get a little creative.

How to Build Backlinks to Your Site – Anchor Text

No-follow and comment links get a lot of bad press. In truth, no proper link building campaign is complete without a wide variety of low-quality links. If you are actually building links, you need to have some low-quality ones coming in for everything to look natural. This is the same concept as with your anchor text, where having 1,000 links coming in with the same anchor text looks fishy, while a nice mixture of anchor text looks fine. Once again using “wireless internet review” as an example, think of some varieties that still carry the same general relevance:

• reviews of wireless internet
• wireless internet comparison
• wireless internet review 2011
• review wireless internet services
• wireless internet reviews

All five of our above ideas will still suggest relevancy for the original anchor text, while making your link building campaign look natural. Don’t be afraid to mix up anchor text in your link campaign. Doing so can’t hurt your SEO as much as it can help it.

How to Build Backlinks to Your Site – Sources

Now that you understand anchor text, let’s talk about where you’re actually getting those links, starting with what Google wants you to do. Link bait is a broad term used to describe content (whether it’s an article, video, widget, picture, infographic, whatever) that people link to naturally, because they find it:

• unique
• valuable
• funny
• frightening
• scholarly

There are some sites that simply thrive on link bait. For example, most news sites like CNN and MSNBC will receive hundreds of links per day because they publish relevant news articles that people care about. Besides being shared endlessly on Facebook and Twitter, they appear on secondary news sources that want to republish the story. The main idea behind link bait is to create value, controversy, or interest. SEOMoz.org provides a great article on how to create link bait.

One of the most popular ways to build links is through guest posting. This is because, if done right, it’s a win/win situation for both the link builder and the blog owner. The link builder gets the link they so desperately seek, and the blog owner gets some free, and hopefully valuable, content. The best way to guest post is within your own niche, asking your contacts if they would be willing to feature a post you’ve written on their blog. You can do guest post exchanges, but having too many reciprocal links can dilute the value of your links. Simply offer something of value, and you should eventually be able to build some high quality links.

Next, we have the low-hanging fruit like directories, article submission sites, blog comments, and some social media. These are generally low quality links, although submitting to the Yahoo! Directory isn’t a bad idea. Treat directories as a way to build some backlink variety, but nothing more. Submission sites like Ezine can be a place to dump low-quality content decaying on your hard drive to target some SEO keywords, but shouldn’t form your overall strategy.

If you choose to comment on others’ blogs and include a link back to your site, don’t spam. Spam doesn’t do anyone any good. Just like with forums, add value to the conversation or don’t bother. Blog owners are fairly relaxed about including links in comments if you contribute something valuable. Some bloggers even use WordPress plugins like CommentLuv to make sure you get some value from commenting.

If you build a high quality site with relevant and valuable content, the links will eventually come. While low-quality links have always been a strategy for the short-term, good links come only with time and dedication. Even guest posting takes an enormous amount of time and provides significant value, so it’s worth using as a primary link building strategy. But in the end, creating valuable content on your own site is the best way to build links, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow.

Do you ever wonder what it really takes to get thousands of links to your website with a small investment? Web developers use link building all the time, whether it’s in the form of countless directory submissions or guest posting. But link baiting is so much more powerful, as long as you know how to do it. People tend to associate link baiting with a “viral or fail” attitude — either a single piece of content gets thousands of links or it was a failure. But that’s not really true. Link baiting is doing what Google wants you to do, creating valuable content that people want to link to, even when you don’t ask them to.

But creating link bait is not as easy as filming your cat walking on the top of the couch, or writing yet another Top 10 Nobody Cares list. Fortunately, however, it’s not as difficult as you might think.

What is Link Bait?

Link bait is content, whether it’s an article, video, picture, widget, or infographic, that’s interesting to a large audience. It stands out as being humorous, valuable, or referential to your niche community. It’s also well designed (or sometimes, as you might find, very poorly designed) to attract attention. Best of all, link bait attracts organic links. While the power of link bait can be limited for keyword SEO (as people are not always going to link to you using the anchor text you want), it is the absolute best way to build authority to a “brandable” domain name. Look no further for an example than a site like Mashable.com.

It shouldn’t take long for business owners to realize the potential behind link bait. After all, almost every television commercial is designed to be memorable – whether it’s sleek, funny, controversial, or provides truly valuable information. Why should the concept be any different with online content?

It’s important to remember that almost any topic can become link bait, depending on how you treat the subject matter. For example, an article entitled “wireless providers in my area” is obviously meant to satisfy an SEO keyword need – but it’s not going to get many links on its own. On the other hand, what if you were to create a widget that matches a user with all of the wireless providers in the area based on their price range, location, technical needs, and housing situation? That could very easily become something people would want to share with others in the niche – link bait at its finest.

How to Create Link Bait

Now that you hopefully understand the power behind link bait, and how it can be applied to any business, it’s time to learn how to create it. Depending on your budget and technical/creative prowess, you might be limited at first – but that’s alright. There are plenty of ways to create link bait without needing to be an all-star content writer or a brilliant graphic designer.

Free to Cheap Options

Link Directories – These tend to be overdone, but I’m including them because they’re easy for anyone to create. Simply find a niche, like “hedgehogs as pets,” and compile a list of links to any sites that you feel have solid information on the topic, or a portion of the topic. Not only to people like to bookmark these pages and link to them, but the people you linked to in the directory may notice your “shout-out” and return the favor.

News-Worthy Articles – Follow Google Trends and news websites closely and create content based on that. Don’t just dryly rewrite the news stories – give them an intelligent, or humorous spin. For example, you might create an article called “The Downward Spiral of [Insert Celebrity]” which tells a story, and links to some major news sources for credibility.

Write Something Scary – Fear really does sell. While you won’t be making anything up if you don’t want to land in hot water, you can take a topic and apply a sense of urgency in an article, perhaps even warning consumers of a danger. Consider the topic “dog food.” You can easily get some clicks or links to an article called “10 Poisonous Chemicals Found in Dog Food” – at least more links than “How to Choose Dog Food.” Remember, don’t fabricate anything to get some links. But do look for information that others might avoid.

Getting on the Expensive Side

Create a Widget – Widgets are absolutely fantastic link bait if you know a programmer willing to work on the cheap, or if you have a decent budget. Widgets don’t fall under the typical umbrella of duplicate content like articles do. So, you have to get your widget out there as much as possible for it to become link bait. The idea behind the widget is to create a useful tool, like a calculator, that people will literally imbed on their blogs or websites. This, in turn, gives you countless links back to your own. We don’t need any more mortgage calculators by the way, but we could use a calculator to help determine how our daily meat consumption matches up to lions, tigers, and bears (oh my…).

Create an Infographic – If done well, and it should be, an infographic is also an expensive investment. Don’t use an infographic to add some pictures to your content – that’s a waste of time. Instead, use the graphics to literally become the content. You could create an inforgraphic listing the tallest mountains in the world with some pictures of mountains to the side. Or, you could have the pictures of the mountains be the data, like a graph. The key to making good infographics is to create them so every image belongs in the graphic. But keep the word count as low as possible – people don’t like to read paragraphs in their graphics.

As you can see, it’s not really all that difficult to create link bait. While you might distribute the content to some friends, the idea is that the majority of people will come to you – not the other way around. Make sure people know your content exists, but don’t force it. You’ll want to have some accurate data to see which efforts work and which don’t anyway. And remember, one solid piece of link bait is worth 100 forced links, every time.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don‘t talk about backlinks to someone. Most people who are not involved with a website don’t even know what a backlink is.

Basically a back link is when a website links from their website to your website with a link that takes a surfer directly to your website. It’s pretty simple to see how backlinks can equal more traffic and more business.

However, this isn’t the only reason to get back links.

A backlink is a type of referral that Google uses to measure your website’s reputation. Google catalogs the number of backlinks and the strength of those backlinks to determine how well your website should rank for the different keywords.

Other words, by getting backlinks you’re getting traffic from other websites as well as raising your visibility in the major search engines like Google.

Back links are important!

And while we are talking about how important backlinks are let’s not forget that they are also used to determine how much are website is worth when you’re getting ready to sell it.

However, not all backlinks are the same.

When it comes to the Internet nothing is as straightforward as it seems. You see most tech wizards and geek geniuses have ended up working for one of the major search engines. This means that even though a standard HTML URL is easy enough to understand, search engine optimization is a totally different game. To make it even more difficult it’s a very secretive game.

Google and the other search engines know that if anyone understood their exact formula they could rank any site for any keyword.

So, while you can learn a lot about how to code and get backlinks, you will never totally understand what each backlink is worth.

Back links have always been a dominant factor when trying to rank for a competitive keyword. However, in the past the algorithms were not designed to take into account people trying to game the system.

Google was one of the first major search engines to start looking at how to reward quality links that were relevant to the content and added something to the site instead of rewarding links that were gaming the system.

Google can now determine quality links while penalizing non-quality links.

Links are no longer counted just for their coding, but the environment around the link is also counted. The environment includes page rank of the site that is linking to you as well as the content on the page and the back links that page has.

Page Rank ranges from 1 to 10, the higher the number the stronger the  link.

This number is nothing more than a measurement of the sites reputation according to the search engine’s algorithm. What you want is a backlink from a site that not only has a higher Page Rank than you do but also has something to do with the content of your site. If your site is about cars you want to be included in a site that reviews car web sites. If you get backlinks from someone who is selling Bibles, it’s likely to be ignored is a good quality backlink.

A link that shows up near the top of the referring page is worth more than one at the bottom.

Of course something else that a lot of people overlook is the anchor text. If you have a site that sells wristbands and the anchor text says pretty wristbands then it won’t be as effect as one that clearly describes your wristbands like quality silicone wristbands.

You need quality anchor text.

In the past people would join link exchange sites to get reciprocal links. But now the search engines actually discount reciprocal links in favor of one way inbound links. This makes it a lot harder to get links because you are no longer able to trade a link for a link.

Here’s how the search engines think.

If I meet someone on the street and they tell me where they live I can get an idea about the person by the neighborhood they live in. I can tell a lot about that person from their neighbors.

The search engines work about the same way, spiders crawl sites that link to you and get an idea about you from what they are saying. If these are quality websites, who are in the same niche as you, and are linking to your site, then it’s a highly relevant and important link.

Immediately we know it’s about quality not quantity.

It’s not how many neighbors you have but the type of neighbors you have. It’s the reason a lot of people get confused about PageRank because it’s not based on the number of links but rather the quality of those links. This is why often times a site with fewer backlinks will outrank a larger site that has more backlinks just by getting the right type of links.

And this makes our job as SEO’s a lot easier. While search engines are programmed people are not. It only takes a couple minutes for a person to form an opinion or get an idea about you and your business. Directing people to your site from link farms and other like-minded sites will hurt your reputation a lot more than any benefits you’ll ever get from them.

And if you’re wondering what an SEO is, there is actually a whole culture built around Google and their search engine policies. Some practices are labeled “Black Hat” for evil marketing practices and other’s white hat practices because these are more natural.

But at the end of the day many gray areas appear on both sides as they are basically things that are commercially motivated but are really hard for search engine to spot.

Now, Google’s focus is keeping themselves in business and if it means destroying you and your business to do so you shouldn’t blame them, however your main goal should be keeping yourself in business and you should look at all your options and decide what’s going to work best for you and not necessarily was going to work best for search engines. Who really even knows rather Google will be here tomorrow?

So your focus should be keeping yourself in business and making sure you don’t trip any of the wires that are keeping others in business.

Directory Submissions

When it comes to link building you may have noticed that directory links do very little in the way of getting your website ranked. Google has become very good at spotting and ignoring the majority of internet directories. Both time and money are lost on mass directory submission.

I would focus on a few submissions to quality and relevant niche directories but that would be about as far as I would go.

Reciprocal Linking

If you’ve been messing with reciprocal linking then you know that the value of a reciprocal link is about as low as you can go. And to make it worst Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say they look for and penalize excessive reciprocal linking.

Oh…and let’s not forget that other webmasters will abuse your trust in a second.

Article sites

There are some really good article sites out there and you can get a link from relevant content on an “authority” domain. Articles can also be “spun” to generate variations of the same article for mass article submission.

However it is time consuming to write them, and does require some skill to construct an effective article. You also need to do some keyword research and weave the keyword into the article naturally.

Blog Commenting

The links obtained from leaving comments on blogs are of very low value. And there is an art to getting the links approved.

Link Buying

Link buying is against Google’s TOS, and can get you removed from the index for a year or more if you caught.

Social Sites

Most social sites do not allow anyone to see your links unless you are logged in, which makes the links useless and those that do show the links use “nofollow” to deter people from placing links.

To make link building more fun we have to build links in a natural way so it does not appear to Google that we are trying to manipulate the system.

No-Follow Links

I am going to go against what seems to be the common wisdom and say that I think having nofollow links pointing to your website is a good thing.

In the past, Google has seemed to be interested in promoting sites that have a variety of links from a variety of sources, I believe that it’s because those sites appear to be more legitimately popular and helpful.

If we have nothing but do-follow links, the site will look suspicious, almost like we doing off-site SEO to the site.

Google does not like search engine optimization people.

Someone doing search engine optimization would get nothing but do-follow links and that could very well set off a red flag in Google.

With that and some data from someone that is doing some testing with ranking a site using nothing but no-follow links, I feel comfortable in saying, I don’t mind having a couple no-follow links.

I’ll even go so far as to say that the disadvantage (in my opinion) is in not having any no-follow links. I read somewhere that 10% of the links online now carry the nofollow attribute.

IP Addresses

Something else to keep in mind is that Google discounts links coming from the same IP address.

Link Velocity

When a new site goes live the website owner will sometimes go crazy building links. They build links using press releases, forums, article sites, directories and so on for about the first month, and then they stop.

This sets off some red flags with Google and can get your site penalized. Extreme growth and fall patterns will lead to your sites rankings dropping. This is the sandbox affect we hear so much about.

PageRank

The little green tool bar does not matter. When you run across someone obsessed with their PR, you’ve found someone that does not have a clue what they are doing.

Deep Linking

Deep linking is very important and makes a sites link profile look more natural. Deep linking is getting links from outside sources pointing at our internal pages. Having internal pages that don’t rank for anything makes those pages pretty much useless.

The way we bring those pages into play is by getting links pointing at them and in turn the whole site flows better. And most natural links will point at internal pages anyway.

.edu & .gov

I am not going to argue this point I know a lot of the SEO people swear that .edu & .gov links count more than a normal link. I’ve seen no proof of this and here is what Matt Cutts had to say about it.

“Typically, our policy is: a link is a link, is a link; wherever that link’s worth is, that is the worth that we give it. Some people ask about links from DMOZ, links from .edu or links from .gov, and they say: “Isn’t there some sort of boost? Isn’t a link better if it comes from a .edu?” The short answer is: no, it is not. It is just .edu links tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to .edu’s or .gov’s.”

I want to end this article by saying one thing. Don’t point all your links at your home page.

Not only does it not look natural but it causes your home page to carry the whole site. By having links pointing at internal pages the site looks more natural and the internal pages help to boost the ranking of all the other pages in the site.

They work together making the site stronger.

When it comes to ranking a website on Google it is all about anchor text and incoming links.

People who obese over keyword density and other on-page factors are just wasting time, on-page SEO will only produce 15% of the ranking results!

And it is this reason that solid keyword research is important, anchor text links containing the right keywords are gold.

A good link is a link with good keyword anchor text, relevant content, high PageRank, which sits on an old domain, with tons of content, visitors and links from all around the net.

No matter how hard you try, you chances of getting one of these links are slim.
So let’s move to real world link building.

First thing we need to understand is that link building is not hard, but it is easy to get drawn into a world of endless analysis, searching and procrastination without ever building any links!

Every link on a webpage is a vote, and the page with the most votes and the most relevant content will win. And to make it more fun all links do not carry an equal vote.

What you are wanting is a high volume of links that have anchor text that is relevant to the page content.

While there are all sorts of things that determine the power of a link, get enough of them and you can rank for any keyword you want to go after.

The easiest type of link to get is a low PR link.

Anyone can get a large number of these types of links quickly and without needing any particular skills or knowledge.

They are not worth a whole lot alone but with enough numbers they become very powerful. You can rank for just about anything with a large number of low PR links.

The second type of link I want to talk about requires some time, effort and skill. These are mid-level PR links that started out has low PR links but have been “powered up” through a trick, nurturing them, or some lateral thinking.

The last type of link I want to talk about is a high PR link. These are ones that you cannot make yourself.

Class 1: Low PR Links

Social bookmarking & pinging
Reciprocal link exchanges
Forum signature links
Directory submissions
Article creation
Blog commenting
Creating Web 2.0 properties & Blogs
Press releases
Profile links
Paid & Incentivized links

Class 2: Mid Level PR Links

Powering-up Level 1 links
Guest blogging
Quality Directory submissions such as DMOZ
Quality profile links
A natural link from another website
Class 3 – High Level PR Links
Wikipedia links (nofollow, but yes still very powerful)
Links on highly trusted, authority sites.