Seven Methods For Getting One-Way Backlinks
by David Baxter
As a website owner, you’re probably familiar with the term SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization). You probably know this relates to how you set up and wrote the content for your website so that it would get high rankings on the search engines. But did you know how much backlinks contribute to the success of your website? Lots of quality one-way backlinks-meaning links from another site to yours for a legitimate reason-help improve your rankings in those search engines.
Along about the time web owners discovered backlinks helped raise their search engine rankings, services sprang up offering to arrange for website owners to exchange links to get large numbers of backlinks. Some even offered to generate links for you for a fee. But search engines soon became wise to this practice, and now websites that try to do this to manipulate the search engine rankings higher actually get penalized by the search engines for these kinds of backlinks. It is a much wiser approach to create natural or organic backlinks legitimately than to generate large quantities of backlinks via these methods. And it’s not that hard to do. Here are seven successful how-to’s you can use to get more one-way backlinks for your website.
1. Write and Market Articles. Whatever your website is about, you can write articles about your topic that other people will find helpful. Then you can use these articles at article sites where people are looking for information. This can generate traffic to your website at no cost to your advertising budget.
Sites like eHow.com, goarticles.com, and ezinearticles.com are where millions of people go when they need to learn something. If you were to write an article about how to care for leather boots and handbags for one of these sites, you would have at the bottom of your article a “resource box” in which you tell a little about yourself and include links to your commercial website. Some of these sites allow links to your site embedded in the articles themselves, and these will also help drive traffic to your site, increasing the probability that you’ll get backlinks.
2. Video Marketing. If you’re using video marketing, you want the maximum number of people to watch your video. There are many ways to promote your video content and encourage backlinks to it. If you have an email newsletter, that’s a great way to get a link to your video content to a lot of people. Some forums and blogs allow links as long as they are not obvious spam posts, and some even allow you to provide a link to your website in your forum “signature.” Read the FAQs on any forum you consider joining before posting links to your site.
Some website owners also announce the release of new videos on their website via Twitter. Twitter is a tool that lets you use short messages (no longer than–0 characters) to make little announcements-and that can include links. Many, many people use Twitter as a resource, so this can be highly effective.
3. Social Bookmarking. You can encourage backlinks with Social Bookmarking sites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon.com. With sites like these, you can submit a link to your website, and people visiting the site will see it when they look for new information related to your website. Not only can they easily visit and watch your video, they can “second” your submission by vouching for it as having good content. The more people who see and like your content, the more prominent the link to your video will become, and the more high quality backlinks you’ll earn.
4. Become a Squidoo Lens Author. Squidoo is another website that allows you to submit content. In this case, the content can include articles or text along with photos and video, as well. Squidoo calls their information blurbs “lenses” and uses them to focus on businesses, products, or other topics. You can go here, create lenses about pertinent topics, and get backlinks and traffic coming to your site.
5. Hubpages. Hubpages is similar to Squidoo in that you use it to make content-rich pages with text, videos, pictures, and links. You create an account, pick a title for your Hubpage, and add tags. Then you add content: photos, text, products, or comments. While you don’t “own” a topic on Hubpages, the more Hubpages you create, the higher your Hubpages ranking will be, and the more you’ll be seen as the expert on a given topic.
6. Submit to Directories. Directory submission is related to submitting to search engines, only it involves submitting to the directories that evaluate the content of websites before they are accepted and listed. Many sites are submitted, so editors can be very selective. So be sure you follow the directions for submissions to the letter and submit in the proper category or subcategory.
7. Use Social Media Sites. You’re probably already familiar with these sites. Social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, DeviantArt, and others. Using sites like this and creating pages for you and your business is very effective in getting backlinks and higher search engine ratings-as long as you keep them current so people don’t forget about you. Also remember that you need to stay professional on these kinds of sites even though they are often used by teens and young adults that may be very irreverent in their communications among themselves. You still need to put a professional image on your business and website.
These seven tips for generating one way backlinks, implemented consistently, will help your site gain many valuable one way backlinks. The more genuine backlinks your site has, the higher it will rise in search engine results. And that is the best way to drive traffic to your site and help your business grow.
