How to make real backlinks

First and foremost, let me just make it clear what I mean by making backlinks. By this, I mean artificial backlinks from sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc... where you spam them with links to your online articles or site. Having backlinks of this nature is not only tedious work, there really isn't any quality in them in terms of the clicks you get, or with Google. Essentially, all you are doing is wasting your time. Now, I've gotten a handful of clicks from these sites, and often times it drives my traffic up a lot on certain days where certain links are popular. At the end of the day though, it's all short-term traffic, and the clicks are only generated from that one day. Afterwards, your link is lost on those sites, never to be clicked again. In the meanwhile, you get false hope that you're getting all these clicks, and then on days where you don't advertise your links as much you get "normal" traffic and get discouraged by it. What you need to do is build your normal traffic, not your artificial traffic.

Firstly, any clicks that you get from sites like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and whatever else are not from people who are actively searching the topic of your article. They click your link, maybe skim it at best, and then go back to what they were doing. The duration of time they spend on your site is minimal, and if they even bother to read it (which is rare in the first place) they most definitely will not be the ones clicking the ads. This is because your link was already a sort of advertisement, it took a pretty rare chance that they landed on your article in the first place. The chance that they'll then go on to click your ad is even more rare, especially since they are in the mindset that your link was spammed with the sole purpose of gaining traffic. As such, these aren't quality links for you as the only thing you gain from it is an addition to your traffic counter.

In terms of Google quality, the links aren't worth much. They usually have a high bounce rate, which means people who click your link quickly get off the page. This can possibly be detrimental to your site by receiving a lower rating by search engines. If Google finds that people aren't actually reading your page when it's clicked, they'll deem it low quality and of little relevance, and so it'll keep getting pushed further back on search results. If your site is on Hubpages, it'll receive a lower hubscore just the same as it'll find that people who come to the articles aren't interested enough in reading them.

As mentioned before, making artificial links such as this is really just a waste of time. Going around and posting your link to a bunch of sites is doing no one any good, and it's not a good way of getting word out about your site. People who want to read your articles will find you. Getting random people to read your articles is just a waste all around.

Okay so, should you stop linking your site to random social bookmarking sites? In a sense, yes. If you want to have natural links, they'll usually come from others. If someone runs a blogging site and finds one of your articles relevant to their blog, THEY will link it themselves, and all of their readers will automatically come to your site with the mindset of reading your article. These clicks will be relevant for you. This takes time to happen, backlinks will grow over time as more and more people share links to your page to other people that they think will be interested. This doesn't happen overnight, and you can't expect it to.You just can't write an article today and expect to have thousands of readers tomorrow. If you let the natural process take place, a well-written article will always generate its own traffic, without you having to constantly be advertising it. The whole idea of passive income comes from the fact that you write your articles, and earn income from them over-time without having to go back to it constantly.

If you have Google Analytics, and the Search Engine section of your traffic isn't the biggest part, you are doing something wrong. By far that should be your largest area. Some exceptions may apply to certain aged articles that have been linked from relevant referral sites and constantly get traffic from them. However, for the most part, your traffic should be coming from search engines. Even then, don't expect that to happen quickly, sometimes it can take a year for search engines to properly rank your page, but as I mentioned before, if it's a well-written article, it will be indexed and found.

If you really, really want to create some backlinks yourself, do them at relevant places. If you are a member of any forums, let's say a music forum, and you have an article that is about music, then link it there. People who click it will be interested to read it, and Google will thus rank it higher in terms of relevance. Meanwhile, since your ads will also be relevant, they are more likely to get clicked. If any other sites are relevant to your topic, then feel free to add your link there. If someone else runs the site, try and contact them and see if they will post your link to their page. A good way of going about this is creating affiliates with sites that are similar to yours so that both of you can share your links back and forth between your sites. Youtube is also a good way of gaining traffic. If you can find a relevant youtube video, contact the creater and ask them to add your link in the description, that could work wonders.

Essentially, if you want quality backlinks, it takes time and effort. It's not as easy as going to a random site and spamming your link there. Either wait for your pages to be indexed properly, or seek other sites willing to affiliate or link back to yours.