In my article on building backlinks manually I discuss the importance of backlinks to SEO in more detail. For the sake of this article I will simply state the following:

• SEO consists of primarily 2 factors: On-Page Factors & Backlinks
• Backlinks come in 2 varities: DO FOLLOW & NOFOLLOW
• Page Rank and Site Authority come from DO FOLLOW links

There are a lot of ways to build backlinks manually. Here is a sample:

• Blog Comments (most blogs are NOFOLLOW though, use CommentHunt.com to find DO FOLLOW)
• Forum Posts & Replies (again most are NOFOLLOW, others have rules about the number of posts and replies you must have and their rated quality before your link are DO FOLLOW)
• Article Marketing (Ezine, HubPages, Squidoo, etc.)
• Video Marketing (YouTube, Viddler, etc. - use HeySpread.com, not free but only about $1 per video to distribute)
• RSS Feeds (I'm only just now getting into this so I'll have to let you know how this goes in a future hub)

There is another way that I describe in my Building Backlinks manually page and that is by creating user accounts on high authority sites. Even though your user profile has a Page Rank of 0 it still appears to have a very positive effect. I've used it extensively for my Free Gift Card site. In fact Article Marketing and this user profile link creation were my only 2 means of backlink building for months. It is clear that I rank on the first page of Google for several keyword terms solely because of this user profile creation loophole.

A Note on Blogs & Backlink Building

As far as I can tell many internet marketers have completely given up on posting blog comments.  Forum postings are still alive but blog comments are almost dead.  I assume this is because of the NOFOLLOW vs DO FOLLOW issues.

As a result many IMers create their own WordPress and Blogspot blogs.  Then they post to those blogs with backlinks to thier "money" site.

Duplicate Content

Now Google is known for discounting or completely ignoring backlinks buried in duplicate content.   In other words, if you publish the same article to every article directory then at most 1 of those articles will likely count.  The same is true of your WordPress or Blogspot blogs.  If you simply repost your articles the backlinks may never count.

That said, I keep tabs on a lot of IMers and some swear up and down that they can post PLR (Private Label Rights articles - articles that you pay for but others have also probably paid for and posted) with good results.  One IMer swears he can send out his PLR to every article directory and to his WordPress and Blogspot blogs as exact duplicates with good success.

In the short term this might work simply because it is probably more likely that Google can find one link at each of several authority sites than it is for Google to find several links from one (depth of crawl).  However, in the long run this probably undermines your "money" site's SEO by undermining the ability of any of these secondary sites to build any Google authority - just an opinion no evidence or experience to back this.

I've built a lot of backlinks over the past several months using manual methods like Article Marketing, YouTube, and blog comments.  It is very time consuming.  And for blog backlinks many of the links are never found or take months to be found.

The most effective strategy for me so far is to use the Peter Drew's Linking Loophole software.  The software can create approx. 90 backlinks (through user profile creation) in a matter of a couple of hours with any anchor text I choose.  Like all backlinks Google is a little slow in finding these backlinks but it does eventually find them.  And Google usually finds at least a handful of the links within a week of my putting them out there.  I run this software about once a week for 2-4 keywords.  On the very first Google update of my Free Gift Card site I have PR of 1.  This isn't huge but it is far from bad as well.

I made a strategic mistake with my Free Gift Card site in that it is a Wiki instead of the WordPress blog.  On-Page SEO for a Mediawiki installation is much harder and in some ways nearly impossible.  Also, WordPress creates so many pages for the categories, tags, archives, etc. that there is a multiplier effect to every article your write that Mediawiki installs just don't get.  So far Google has found the following backlinks to my site:

• All of my Ezine Articles
• A few of my HubPages Articles
• None of the rest of my Article Marketing pages
• A few dozen links from these user profiles

I currently use Drew's Linking Loophole and RSS promotion tools.  Both are excellent but the Linking Loophole - which is very new - has this great feature where it can automatically answer CAPCHAs for you.  This is how I can build hundreds of backlinks in a couple of hours.  Most of that time is used answering confirmation emails from the sites where the user profiles were created.

On Nov. 18th, 2009 Peter Drew releases his long awaited Brute Force SEO:EVOII.  EVOII is an improvement on Drew's current Brute Force SEO tool.  I have not been privy to an advanced copy but I intend to grab my free trial as soon as it becomes available.  Linking Loophole has been well worth the money I spend each month on it.  EVOII will create accounts for you (and answer those confirmation emails), promote/submit your article content to web.20 sites, promote/submit your videos, as well as creating backlinks everywhere.

One of Drew's SEO strategies is to submit content to web 2.0 sites, submit videos, create user profiles (Linking Loophole) and then takes these URLs and create an RSS feed from them.  Then he promotes those RSS feeds all the web.  He then takes those feeds and creates another feed to promote.  I think you get the point.  Drew claims that using this method he turn just a few articles into over 2000 backlinks for your site.

1. Find a few good niches to dominate
2. Write 5-10 articles for each niche
3. Find (not create) 5-10 YouTube videos for each niche
4. Create Amazon/Clickbank store related to each niche