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Here is a feature article from Nick Bokhonok who has been creating web projects, Internet marketing and SEO tools since 2000. His expertise is helping people generate good quality backlinks to their site…which is an absolute requirement for getting top search engine rankings in competitive phrases.
In December 2008 Nick released Free Traffic System – free community where bloggers can build backlinks, get free content and push their sites to top pages in search engines.
Here’s Nick…
Finally you found the courage to admit that you need quality backlinks 
Nothing bad about it. Building backlinks is the same to building nice relationships in offline business. But you must build your backlinks in a civilized way, otherwise search engines will seriously “frown” upon your web site.
To save you from possible traps and problems of link building this post that will explain:
(1) What is a quality backlink in the eyes of search engines.
(2) What strategies you can use to build quality backlinks to your sites in any niche.
Quality Backlink – What is That?
Only search engines can give the ultimate answer to this question. But my personal (and quite successful) link building experience and the methods used by other SEO experts for brought me to creating this quality backlinks checklist:
• Relevancy – backlink should come from the page of the same topic.
• Diversity – all your backlinks shouldn’t come from one or several sites; the more different sites with different IPs give you backlinks, the more reputation you get in the eyes of search engines.
• Anchor text diversity – backlinks should have different anchor text (also known as hyperlinked text), otherwise your link building looks unnatural to search engines.
• NO – if a backlink has attribute in its HTML code, it means that this backlink is not passing the SEO value from its page to the page of your site.
• Age of backlink – the longer a backlink to your site is “alive”, the more SEO value it has.
• General value of page – SEO value of the page that is giving you backlink plays a vital role; the SEO value is much beyond Google PageRank of the page, among other vital factors for the SEO value of the page it is possible to mention the age of the page, what type of content it has, how many outgoing links it is giving, etc.
• Adequacy of your page – you must have the words (for which you are building backlinks) on your page to which you are building backlinks, otherwise it will look inadequate in the eyes of search engines.
This checklist has proven to be very helpful in making your link building effective. If you follow it, you will make your backlinks look natural and adequate for search engines.
Now that you know the criteria for backlink quality, let’s get down to the strategies of link building.
Link Building Strategies – Realistic Ways to Build Backlinks
Each of the strategies will have a brief explanation how they work; with the typical pros and cons of each strategy.
Niche Forums
A niche forum is a great place to build business relations, gather contacts and get quality backlinks. Forums traditionally have a high trust level for the search engines. That is why backlinks from forums will definitely add SEO value to your site.
Usually forums allow having a link or several links in a forum signature. Any time you make a reply on a forum, your signature gets published at the bottom of your reply, and this is how you can build lots of backlinks.
So, you choose reputable niche forums, join them and start making your contributions to the discussion. Do not spam, do not say nonsense, be concise and speak up to the point.
You can also try posting your site link into the forum reply. But do it only when this link is really up to the point for the discussion, otherwise you might be considered to act as spammer, and this can result in closing your forum account forever.
Make sure that the backlinks from the forum do not have .
Another very important thing is to pay attention that forum is giving you a link DIRECTLY to the page. The problem is that some forums – when giving an outgoing backlink – do it with the help of special redirect page. Basically they give a backlink to a redirect page, and only then this page automatically redirects you to your page.
This is not a problem in terms of people who will get to your site, but for SEO that will mean that the backlinks built by you on this forum are helping to increase the SEO value of the forum (its redirect pages), but not the SEO value of your site.
On one forum you can build hundreds of backlinks. But one forum is not enough. Don’t forget that search engines love diversity of backlinks, they prefer the links to be coming from different sites. Hence, focusing on one site – even if it is the top reputable forum in your niche – is not enough in terms of backlinks. Several forums in your niche would be a good choice to meet the diversity demands.
Niche Blog Commenting
Blogs in your niche (especially the blogs that are several years “old”) are considered to be very trusted with search engines and their algorithms.
You can visit the blogs and leave comments to the posts of these blogs. Usually the web form – where you are leaving a comment – asks for your name, email, URL and the comment text. Into the URL field of the web form you put a URL of the page that you are trying to push and thus, when your comment gets published, you get a backlink from a nice page of a trusted blog.
It makes no big difference if you are posting to a fresh post or a post that has several years of age – both will do fine. But posting comments to old posts has special SEO perk, because for SEO a web page that is several years has gained solid reputation, and getting a backlink from such a page is a great thing to do.
A typical problem about blog commenting is that the majority of the blogs have on the links in comments. It is really a big challenge to find a reputable blog without on the comments.
There are some solutions/scripts that help to find blogs in your niche without , but before purchasing such solutions – make sure to get a free trial or demo version. It is a must! I have personally tested some solutions that promised to find lots of blogs in any niche, and the demo showed that finding a blog without with the help of that solutions was a real challenge.
So, ask for a free trial. If you find at least 3-5 blogs with in your niche, then this solution is worth the money to buy it.
Ok, finally found a reputable niche blog without , then take it as a gift from above.
Do your commenting job seriously, the way you do it with niche forums. Make each of your comments to add real informational value to the post. Then the blog owner will put you out of the crowd of other “commentors” and publish your comments with pleasure. Maybe, responsible commenting can even grow to a new level of business relations between your site and this blog.
The quality of backlinks from comments on the blogs in your niche is very high.
Blog “Digesting” Communities
If you are running a blog, then you get a great advantage. Blogs allow to be inside lots of blog “digesting” communities; for example, Technorati.
For you to understand how you are going to get backlinks from the blog “digesting” communities, you need to understand why they were created.
Blogging has become a hit and ignited lots of people to create content, huge masses of content. This provoked the creation of web projects help people to search and find useful info in the blogosphere.
On the pages of these communities each blog has its own personal page, the pages for each of its posts, for the tags of each of the posts and many other web pages. And most of these pages give you backlinks. This means that your regular blogging brings you not only great content for the blog readers, but also lots of backlinks from the web pages of reputable services. When I say “lots of backlinks” it means that each your post, especially if you work with tags on the post, can give you well over a dozen of backlinks from such communities.
And if your site is not a blog – no problem. Open a blog on the site, and this will give extra SEO effect and more backlinks.
Directory Submissions
Directory is a list of links, that are structured into categories and subcategories according to their relevance to a specific topic. You can submit your site to various directories and get backlinks from them.
Usually a directory submission procedure is about filling out the web application form with details about the site that you are submitting. After your site is reviewed and approved for publication in one of the categories of the directory – this information gets published on their page, hence, you get a backlink.
Today you can find lots of niche-specific and general directories that are accepting sites and give backlinks for free or for a fee. Some of the directories have great trust in the eyes of search engine, like for example, Google Directory, or dmoz.org – getting a backlink from the directory of this kind is a serious asset in terms of SEO.
There are special solutions that help to automate the process of directory submission. You enter your site details, and they automatically send these details to lots of different link directories. But you must be aware of the fact that with quality and reputable link directories (and these are the most valuable in terms of SEO) you need to do all the job manually, because they demand special care and attention to their service – directory submission solutions here will not help.
Many directories will offer you to publish a backlink to them, in return for giving you a backlink. Though you are free whether to agree or decline the reciprocal link exchange proposition, it is better not to reciprocate, because one way link to your site has more SEO value then reciprocal link.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking networks (like Del.icio.us) allow their users to bookmark interesting pages. Technically when someone bookmarks your page, it means a short digest about the page (page title, description, tags) is published on a page of a social bookmarking service with a backlink to your page. The more users of these network bookmark your web pages, the more backlinks your web page is receiving.
When the bookmarking services got famous, several automatic and semi-automatic bookmarking solutions appeared on the market. One needs to open different accounts (under different usernames) in the bookmarking community, and the solution automatically logs under these usernames and bookmarks your page, thus creating the illusion that many different users are bookmarking your page.
Definitely the pages of famous social bookmarking services have great trust in the eyes of search engines. The problem is that almost all famous and SEO trustworthy boomarking networks put on the outgoing backlinks.
Some of the services do not have at the beginning. But once they become very popular – they resort to trick. That is why with social bookmarking you can never be sure that your backlink building is going to have permanent effect, as with the growth of the network its owners can take a decision “Ok, we are big enough to start doing the thing” – and all link building job will get wasted.
Social News Networks
Social news network emerged on the wave of giving simple people a possibility to share great news with the rest of the world. This is a network where simple people can submit the information about what they consider of interest to the rest of the world.
You open an account in such network (like Digg.com) and can make the rest of the world learn about the information that you are promoting. Usually in social news networks you can submit tiny digest with title, description of the news and link to the web page where people can get more information about this issue.
Thus, if you have something important and news-worthy on your site, you can build backlinks to its web pages. As big social news services are trustworthy in the eyes of search engines, the backlinks from their pages have significant SEO value. If you seriously work with adding new information to your site, then social news networks can help to you build lots of quality backlinks. Moreover, today you can find news networks in almost any niche, thus you will be getting very relevant backlinks.
The only drawback is that recently many of these services also started to put on the outgoing links. That is why one should take this issue into account, before starting link building with a particular social news network.
Still, as the market of social news networks is rapidly growing, you can find plenty of networks that do not exercise the policy.
Link Brokers
Link brokers work like intermediaries between the people who want to buy backlinks and the people who are ready to sell backlinks from their sites.
The advantage of the service is that most of the job is automated: you enter the keyword to find relevant sites and start buying backlinks from them. This saves a lot of time as you do not need to work with each site individually, negotiate the deal, mess up with individual payments and other routine.
Plus you have control about the relevancy of the sites that you are choosing, and this adds to the value of backlinks gained via link brokers.
One more advantage is that link brokers give you tools to track the backlinks, thus you stay in total control of the backlinks which you have gathered via a specific link broker.
Usually you need to pay for every link separately or pay a monthly fee. But as link broker service offers you to sell your web page space (for links to other sites), you can leverage on the profits and expenses within the framework of link brokerage service.
A disadvantage is that link brokers add backlinks via specific code, and this code can be traceable by search engine robot, thus giving away that you are buying backlinks from a link broker – and search engines seriously frown upon paid links.
For example, this summer one guy was offering a free service. One could type site URL into the web form, and the service was “telling” if this site had any backlinks coming from paid brokers and was naming that brokers.
That is why, most likely, it is just a matter of time before search engines start using this kind of algorithm to spot the sites which are buying backlinks from link brokers.
No need to panic – it is too early to say that link brokers are easily traceable now. But in the nearest future the link brokers should come up with a new level of protection against detecting their footprints, or this can cause a big problem to their clients.
Link Exchanges
Link exchanges are simple. Site A and site B agree to put links to each other. This is the simplest version of link exchange, called reciprocate link exchange or 2 way link exchange.
Link exchange was a hit once, but today Google puts less value in reciprocal links. That is why SEO experts started to use more sophisticated versions of link exchange. For example, site A links to site B, site B links to site C, and site C links to site A. This was an example of 3 way link exchanges. There are 4 way, 5 way and other versions of link exchange. In addition to adding more elements to the link exchange ring, SEO experts also try to make the whole interlinking to be done under very tricky rules so that the whole network of sites that interlink with each other look more natural.
It is important to mention that with 3-, 4- or more-way linking your site is getting one way links, this is much better than simple reciprocal (2 way) linking.
The advantage of the link exchange services is the high automation of the link exchange process, possibility to take care of the relevancy of your link partners and possibility to track if a site is giving or not giving you a backlink.
Though on some SEO forums the debates about cracking this type of linking with special mathematic algorithms (graph theory, for example) still go on, at the moment there are no reports that people have any problems because of using 3 way linking services and other services of this kind.
At the moment this is one of the most popular ways to quickly build backlinks with the help of automatic solutions.
Article Marketing
The idea of article marketing in terms of SEO is simple and very smart – you write a good article with the author resource box at the bottom of the article. This resource box allows having a backlink. You submit article to several famous article directories, when the article gets published – you get backlinks.
This is the type of link building which has a very safe future. Don’t forget that search engines always need new information to show to their surfers. Without new unique content the life of search engines is going to become problematic.
That is why search engines will always welcome the creation of new content, articles including. Hence, your backlinks from the articles (read “from big piece of new content”) will always remain a safe SEO asset.
Moreover, as your articles get published on the reputable article directories, the pages of these directories also have serious reputation with search engines, thus – your backlinks from these will pages have nice value.
And finally, your article is likely to be republished by other people who may put a backlink to your site. This means extra backlinks for free!
But there are 2 disadvantages of article marketing for SEO.
First of all, you create one big article to get just a few backlinks. Not the best deal in terms of SEO.
Another problem is that article directories are “harvested” by content stealers. They republish your article, but, most often, when there are doing it the backlinks are deleted, because content thieves hate giving away backlinks.
New Age Article Marketing
This type of article marketing exploits the concept of “create content – get backlinks in return – no one touches your backlinks.” The creators of content and those who republish it come into some sort of agreement: content creators allow to republish their content and content republishers do not touch the backlinks. As they all are the members of the same community, it is very easy to see if someone is cheating and force the cheater play by the rules.
This is a nice alternative to traditional article marketing where you have no control over the republishing of your content.
The example of such community is FreeTrafficSystem where content creators get up to 60 permanent backlinks from every article submitted to the system. Content creators choose the relevancy of the blog where their articles are going to be republished. The backlinks come from inside relevant blog posts, the blogs belong to different people (and are hosted on different IPs).
Surely this strategy involves some manual work. You do not push a button and get thousands of backlinks. But creating content cannot be automated as robots have not learned to write great articles yet. Hence, you need to invest some time into creating an article, but the rest of the submission process in nicely automated.
FreeTrafficSystem is a free service, because its owners want to make the idea of civilized content republishing more popular and invite people to see how it helps to build quality backlinks.
The time has come for the new standards of responsibility between content creators and content republishers – it is possible to make both parties benefit from the cooperation and spread the horizons for civilized link building and getting online publicity.
Summary.
I am sure this information will help you to build a good battle plan for your link building.
It is important to understand that not a single strategy from this list is the ultimate solution to your SEO success; they all have advantages and disadvantages.
My personal recommendation – exploit all of them as this will help to make your link building look diversified and natural.
Please feel welcome to comment to this post with your own link building experiences, ideas and feedback. Your opinion matters!
Jackie Tulos
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Link Building Strategies Review For 2009
By Jackie TulosWelcome back! Subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In December 2008 Nick released Free Traffic System – free community where bloggers can build backlinks, get free content and push their sites to top pages in search engines.
Here’s Nick…
Finally you found the courage to admit that you need quality backlinks
Nothing bad about it. Building backlinks is the same to building nice relationships in offline business. But you must build your backlinks in a civilized way, otherwise search engines will seriously “frown” upon your web site.
To save you from possible traps and problems of link building this post that will explain:
(1) What is a quality backlink in the eyes of search engines.
(2) What strategies you can use to build quality backlinks to your sites in any niche.
Quality Backlink – What is That?
Only search engines can give the ultimate answer to this question. But my personal (and quite successful) link building experience and the methods used by other SEO experts for brought me to creating this quality backlinks checklist:
• Relevancy – backlink should come from the page of the same topic.
• Diversity – all your backlinks shouldn’t come from one or several sites; the more different sites with different IPs give you backlinks, the more reputation you get in the eyes of search engines.
• Anchor text diversity – backlinks should have different anchor text (also known as hyperlinked text), otherwise your link building looks unnatural to search engines.
• NO – if a backlink has attribute in its HTML code, it means that this backlink is not passing the SEO value from its page to the page of your site.
• Age of backlink – the longer a backlink to your site is “alive”, the more SEO value it has.
• General value of page – SEO value of the page that is giving you backlink plays a vital role; the SEO value is much beyond Google PageRank of the page, among other vital factors for the SEO value of the page it is possible to mention the age of the page, what type of content it has, how many outgoing links it is giving, etc.
• Adequacy of your page – you must have the words (for which you are building backlinks) on your page to which you are building backlinks, otherwise it will look inadequate in the eyes of search engines.
This checklist has proven to be very helpful in making your link building effective. If you follow it, you will make your backlinks look natural and adequate for search engines.
Now that you know the criteria for backlink quality, let’s get down to the strategies of link building.
Link Building Strategies – Realistic Ways to Build Backlinks
Each of the strategies will have a brief explanation how they work; with the typical pros and cons of each strategy.
Niche Forums
A niche forum is a great place to build business relations, gather contacts and get quality backlinks. Forums traditionally have a high trust level for the search engines. That is why backlinks from forums will definitely add SEO value to your site.
Usually forums allow having a link or several links in a forum signature. Any time you make a reply on a forum, your signature gets published at the bottom of your reply, and this is how you can build lots of backlinks.
So, you choose reputable niche forums, join them and start making your contributions to the discussion. Do not spam, do not say nonsense, be concise and speak up to the point.
You can also try posting your site link into the forum reply. But do it only when this link is really up to the point for the discussion, otherwise you might be considered to act as spammer, and this can result in closing your forum account forever.
Make sure that the backlinks from the forum do not have .
Another very important thing is to pay attention that forum is giving you a link DIRECTLY to the page. The problem is that some forums – when giving an outgoing backlink – do it with the help of special redirect page. Basically they give a backlink to a redirect page, and only then this page automatically redirects you to your page.
This is not a problem in terms of people who will get to your site, but for SEO that will mean that the backlinks built by you on this forum are helping to increase the SEO value of the forum (its redirect pages), but not the SEO value of your site.
On one forum you can build hundreds of backlinks. But one forum is not enough. Don’t forget that search engines love diversity of backlinks, they prefer the links to be coming from different sites. Hence, focusing on one site – even if it is the top reputable forum in your niche – is not enough in terms of backlinks. Several forums in your niche would be a good choice to meet the diversity demands.
Niche Blog Commenting
Blogs in your niche (especially the blogs that are several years “old”) are considered to be very trusted with search engines and their algorithms.
You can visit the blogs and leave comments to the posts of these blogs. Usually the web form – where you are leaving a comment – asks for your name, email, URL and the comment text. Into the URL field of the web form you put a URL of the page that you are trying to push and thus, when your comment gets published, you get a backlink from a nice page of a trusted blog.
It makes no big difference if you are posting to a fresh post or a post that has several years of age – both will do fine. But posting comments to old posts has special SEO perk, because for SEO a web page that is several years has gained solid reputation, and getting a backlink from such a page is a great thing to do.
A typical problem about blog commenting is that the majority of the blogs have on the links in comments. It is really a big challenge to find a reputable blog without on the comments.
There are some solutions/scripts that help to find blogs in your niche without , but before purchasing such solutions – make sure to get a free trial or demo version. It is a must! I have personally tested some solutions that promised to find lots of blogs in any niche, and the demo showed that finding a blog without with the help of that solutions was a real challenge.
So, ask for a free trial. If you find at least 3-5 blogs with in your niche, then this solution is worth the money to buy it.
Ok, finally found a reputable niche blog without , then take it as a gift from above.
Do your commenting job seriously, the way you do it with niche forums. Make each of your comments to add real informational value to the post. Then the blog owner will put you out of the crowd of other “commentors” and publish your comments with pleasure. Maybe, responsible commenting can even grow to a new level of business relations between your site and this blog.
The quality of backlinks from comments on the blogs in your niche is very high.
Blog “Digesting” Communities
If you are running a blog, then you get a great advantage. Blogs allow to be inside lots of blog “digesting” communities; for example, Technorati.
For you to understand how you are going to get backlinks from the blog “digesting” communities, you need to understand why they were created.
Blogging has become a hit and ignited lots of people to create content, huge masses of content. This provoked the creation of web projects help people to search and find useful info in the blogosphere.
On the pages of these communities each blog has its own personal page, the pages for each of its posts, for the tags of each of the posts and many other web pages. And most of these pages give you backlinks. This means that your regular blogging brings you not only great content for the blog readers, but also lots of backlinks from the web pages of reputable services. When I say “lots of backlinks” it means that each your post, especially if you work with tags on the post, can give you well over a dozen of backlinks from such communities.
And if your site is not a blog – no problem. Open a blog on the site, and this will give extra SEO effect and more backlinks.
Directory Submissions
Directory is a list of links, that are structured into categories and subcategories according to their relevance to a specific topic. You can submit your site to various directories and get backlinks from them.
Usually a directory submission procedure is about filling out the web application form with details about the site that you are submitting. After your site is reviewed and approved for publication in one of the categories of the directory – this information gets published on their page, hence, you get a backlink.
Today you can find lots of niche-specific and general directories that are accepting sites and give backlinks for free or for a fee. Some of the directories have great trust in the eyes of search engine, like for example, Google Directory, or dmoz.org – getting a backlink from the directory of this kind is a serious asset in terms of SEO.
There are special solutions that help to automate the process of directory submission. You enter your site details, and they automatically send these details to lots of different link directories. But you must be aware of the fact that with quality and reputable link directories (and these are the most valuable in terms of SEO) you need to do all the job manually, because they demand special care and attention to their service – directory submission solutions here will not help.
Many directories will offer you to publish a backlink to them, in return for giving you a backlink. Though you are free whether to agree or decline the reciprocal link exchange proposition, it is better not to reciprocate, because one way link to your site has more SEO value then reciprocal link.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking networks (like Del.icio.us) allow their users to bookmark interesting pages. Technically when someone bookmarks your page, it means a short digest about the page (page title, description, tags) is published on a page of a social bookmarking service with a backlink to your page. The more users of these network bookmark your web pages, the more backlinks your web page is receiving.
When the bookmarking services got famous, several automatic and semi-automatic bookmarking solutions appeared on the market. One needs to open different accounts (under different usernames) in the bookmarking community, and the solution automatically logs under these usernames and bookmarks your page, thus creating the illusion that many different users are bookmarking your page.
Definitely the pages of famous social bookmarking services have great trust in the eyes of search engines. The problem is that almost all famous and SEO trustworthy boomarking networks put on the outgoing backlinks.
Some of the services do not have at the beginning. But once they become very popular – they resort to trick. That is why with social bookmarking you can never be sure that your backlink building is going to have permanent effect, as with the growth of the network its owners can take a decision “Ok, we are big enough to start doing the thing” – and all link building job will get wasted.
Social News Networks
Social news network emerged on the wave of giving simple people a possibility to share great news with the rest of the world. This is a network where simple people can submit the information about what they consider of interest to the rest of the world.
You open an account in such network (like Digg.com) and can make the rest of the world learn about the information that you are promoting. Usually in social news networks you can submit tiny digest with title, description of the news and link to the web page where people can get more information about this issue.
Thus, if you have something important and news-worthy on your site, you can build backlinks to its web pages. As big social news services are trustworthy in the eyes of search engines, the backlinks from their pages have significant SEO value. If you seriously work with adding new information to your site, then social news networks can help to you build lots of quality backlinks. Moreover, today you can find news networks in almost any niche, thus you will be getting very relevant backlinks.
The only drawback is that recently many of these services also started to put on the outgoing links. That is why one should take this issue into account, before starting link building with a particular social news network.
Still, as the market of social news networks is rapidly growing, you can find plenty of networks that do not exercise the policy.
Link Brokers
Link brokers work like intermediaries between the people who want to buy backlinks and the people who are ready to sell backlinks from their sites.
The advantage of the service is that most of the job is automated: you enter the keyword to find relevant sites and start buying backlinks from them. This saves a lot of time as you do not need to work with each site individually, negotiate the deal, mess up with individual payments and other routine.
Plus you have control about the relevancy of the sites that you are choosing, and this adds to the value of backlinks gained via link brokers.
One more advantage is that link brokers give you tools to track the backlinks, thus you stay in total control of the backlinks which you have gathered via a specific link broker.
Usually you need to pay for every link separately or pay a monthly fee. But as link broker service offers you to sell your web page space (for links to other sites), you can leverage on the profits and expenses within the framework of link brokerage service.
A disadvantage is that link brokers add backlinks via specific code, and this code can be traceable by search engine robot, thus giving away that you are buying backlinks from a link broker – and search engines seriously frown upon paid links.
For example, this summer one guy was offering a free service. One could type site URL into the web form, and the service was “telling” if this site had any backlinks coming from paid brokers and was naming that brokers.
That is why, most likely, it is just a matter of time before search engines start using this kind of algorithm to spot the sites which are buying backlinks from link brokers.
No need to panic – it is too early to say that link brokers are easily traceable now. But in the nearest future the link brokers should come up with a new level of protection against detecting their footprints, or this can cause a big problem to their clients.
Link Exchanges
Link exchanges are simple. Site A and site B agree to put links to each other. This is the simplest version of link exchange, called reciprocate link exchange or 2 way link exchange.
Link exchange was a hit once, but today Google puts less value in reciprocal links. That is why SEO experts started to use more sophisticated versions of link exchange. For example, site A links to site B, site B links to site C, and site C links to site A. This was an example of 3 way link exchanges. There are 4 way, 5 way and other versions of link exchange. In addition to adding more elements to the link exchange ring, SEO experts also try to make the whole interlinking to be done under very tricky rules so that the whole network of sites that interlink with each other look more natural.
It is important to mention that with 3-, 4- or more-way linking your site is getting one way links, this is much better than simple reciprocal (2 way) linking.
The advantage of the link exchange services is the high automation of the link exchange process, possibility to take care of the relevancy of your link partners and possibility to track if a site is giving or not giving you a backlink.
Though on some SEO forums the debates about cracking this type of linking with special mathematic algorithms (graph theory, for example) still go on, at the moment there are no reports that people have any problems because of using 3 way linking services and other services of this kind.
At the moment this is one of the most popular ways to quickly build backlinks with the help of automatic solutions.
Article Marketing
The idea of article marketing in terms of SEO is simple and very smart – you write a good article with the author resource box at the bottom of the article. This resource box allows having a backlink. You submit article to several famous article directories, when the article gets published – you get backlinks.
This is the type of link building which has a very safe future. Don’t forget that search engines always need new information to show to their surfers. Without new unique content the life of search engines is going to become problematic.
That is why search engines will always welcome the creation of new content, articles including. Hence, your backlinks from the articles (read “from big piece of new content”) will always remain a safe SEO asset.
Moreover, as your articles get published on the reputable article directories, the pages of these directories also have serious reputation with search engines, thus – your backlinks from these will pages have nice value.
And finally, your article is likely to be republished by other people who may put a backlink to your site. This means extra backlinks for free!
But there are 2 disadvantages of article marketing for SEO.
First of all, you create one big article to get just a few backlinks. Not the best deal in terms of SEO.
Another problem is that article directories are “harvested” by content stealers. They republish your article, but, most often, when there are doing it the backlinks are deleted, because content thieves hate giving away backlinks.
New Age Article Marketing
This type of article marketing exploits the concept of “create content – get backlinks in return – no one touches your backlinks.” The creators of content and those who republish it come into some sort of agreement: content creators allow to republish their content and content republishers do not touch the backlinks. As they all are the members of the same community, it is very easy to see if someone is cheating and force the cheater play by the rules.
This is a nice alternative to traditional article marketing where you have no control over the republishing of your content.
The example of such community is FreeTrafficSystem where content creators get up to 60 permanent backlinks from every article submitted to the system. Content creators choose the relevancy of the blog where their articles are going to be republished. The backlinks come from inside relevant blog posts, the blogs belong to different people (and are hosted on different IPs).
Surely this strategy involves some manual work. You do not push a button and get thousands of backlinks. But creating content cannot be automated as robots have not learned to write great articles yet. Hence, you need to invest some time into creating an article, but the rest of the submission process in nicely automated.
FreeTrafficSystem is a free service, because its owners want to make the idea of civilized content republishing more popular and invite people to see how it helps to build quality backlinks.
The time has come for the new standards of responsibility between content creators and content republishers – it is possible to make both parties benefit from the cooperation and spread the horizons for civilized link building and getting online publicity.
Summary.
I am sure this information will help you to build a good battle plan for your link building.
It is important to understand that not a single strategy from this list is the ultimate solution to your SEO success; they all have advantages and disadvantages.
My personal recommendation – exploit all of them as this will help to make your link building look diversified and natural.
Please feel welcome to comment to this post with your own link building experiences, ideas and feedback. Your opinion matters!
Jackie Tulos