How to Use Link Building to Get Backlinks - Made Easy

Getting Quality Backlinks to your website/blog/hub is one of the main ways that you can improve the search engine visibility of your site for the keywords that are important to you. Links to your site from other sites, known as incoming links and backlinks are a way that the search engines determine how important, and how relevant your site is to specific searches performed.

Back in the early days of SEO, it was fairly easy to get quality backlinks... there were a number of free directories, and several business specific directories at no or low cost. Now the picture is a little different. Most large directories charge a fee to be listed, many specialty directories have sprung up with high costs as well. It helps to watch your Analytics to see if these sites you are paying to be listed with are actually sending you any traffic of value.

This Hub will cover some low and no cost ways to get backlinks to your website and ways you can take things into your own hands by effective use of your blog to help promote your website or Hubs.

Having excellent and helpful content is one of the best ways to encourage people to bookmark and link to your site, these other suggestions will help you spread the word about your great content.

There are still some basics to link building that are easy and fairly inexpensive to implement, the site Strongest Links has a list of directories and their page ranks and prices for your information. If you are a retail business or have the budget for it, I highly recommend the Yahoo Directory. There is also The Open Directory but in my experience there hasn't been anything new going on there for a long time, trying to get a listing there is like dropping a penny into a deep well and hoping to hear it land... someday.

Also, don't overlook:

• Your Business or Professional Association
• Your Chamber of Commerce
• Any local Business directories
• Related/complementary businesses (eg. a kitchen remodeling contractor and take-out catering)

An easy way to get a number of quality backlinks to your website is to the use the content (and sidebar) of your own blog. If you use the sidebar of the blog, every new blog post will have a backlink to your website (or Hub). The important thing is to make sure to use keyword-rich link text... and that is:

How to Start an Organic Garden Made Easy

vs.

Click here for my article on Organic Gardening.

I did a short screen-cast on how to use keyword-rich link text.

Using other kinds of sites;

• Related Blogs
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
• Press Releases and Articles
• Social Bookmarking Sites (Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg)

are all good self-determined ways to get incoming links.

Always keep your primary keywords in mind, they will help you stay focused on the word phrases to use in your content and whenever possible to use as the keyword-rich link text in your content to link back to your site