Generate Backlinks - Build Page Rank

To receive free, organic (natural) traffic from the search engines, it is critical to generate backlinks to your website. Backlinks are the main part of what's known as off-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and are extremely important to get high page rank and consequently free search engine traffic.

Big, popular sites like Amazon, eBay, YouTube etc. have thousands and thousands (some even millions) of inbound links (backlinks). So, what do those sites do to acquire backlinks? Nothing, in fact, because they don't need to. People link to these sites because of their great value; they want to get back to them again and again and therefore make a link 'back' to them.

You can do the same as the popular sites to generate backlinks - create something that is a valuable resource for people. If you can create a website with excellent information on a certain topic, which becomes the go-to place for information on that topic, the backlinks (and eventually traffic) will come by itself.

However, you will need to build inbound links upfront, to get the snowball start rolling and getting some initial traffic. Beside the quality and quantity of your incoming links, the relevance of the links is important. This means that you should aim to get links from sites that contain content related to the topic of your own site.

More on some important link building factors here.

There are many ways to build inbound links, and here are some of the most common:

Links from Articles
One of the most common ways to generate backlinks is writing and publishing articles. In fact article marketing is one of the oldest SEO strategies there is. In addition to inpointing links to your site from the sites (directories) where your articles are published, you may also get traffic directly from the articles - from people who read an article and click on your links.

Article marketing has three main benefits:

Your articles will build inbound links to your website and thus increase page rank.
They will generate direct traffic from people who read your articles.
Your articles can be republished (with your links intact) on other sites, which can produce many backlinks from various websites, along with direct traffic from them.

Forum Links
If you have visited a forum, you know that they are an excellent source of information that you may not find anywhere else. By posting in forums you will get backlinks (through your signature), and you may also receive traffic directly from your forum posts. Even better, this traffic is often highly targeted.

Blog Links
You can receive a nifty, targeted link to your site by leaving a comment on a blog in your niche. When leaving a comment, it is important to add the address of your website. Many blogs will allow visitors to leave the URL of their site along with the comment (making a link back to your site). Make sure you write a useful and interesting comment to get it approved by the blog owner.

You can find relevant blogs by doing a Google Blog Search about your topic.

Links from Social Sites
Social bookmarking has become a huge thing in the past few years when it comes to attracting inbound links. Sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon can help creating backlinks immensely, as well as bring in some decent direct traffic. Likewise with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others; the most effective way to get traffic flowing to your page is to have more people to see it.

Using social media sites for marketing purposes is huge these days, so be sure to explore our social media marketing pages.

Links from Web Directories
A web directory is an excellent place to add your URL and receive a quick backlink. Not to be confused with search engines, web directories are compilations of websites categorized by topic. Usually you will have to pick a category you would like to be listed in. There are both paid and free directories.

Here is a list of top directories that you can look into and generate backlinks from.

Link Baiting
Link baiting sounds like something dubious that you want to stay away from, but it only means that you offer people something valuable and helpful on your website that they will want to come back to again and again. By offering a useful and unique page that is naturally 'linkworthy' you can have lots of other sites link to yours.

This is the free and natural way to creating incoming links - getting them because people want or need the information on your website. Examples of that kind of web pages are currency converter (exchange) pages, mortgage calculators, calendars and more.

On this very website we have an 'Article Word Count' page (its link is on the nav bar to the left), where people can easily determine the number of words of an article or other written text.

How-to Guides
How-to guides are a kind of 'link baiting' strategy, and can be a successful tactic to generate backlinks. Look at sites like SearchEngineWatch, who has become immensely popular because it contains so much valuable and useful content. That site has over 200,000 inlinks, and most of them are "free" due to the fact that people want to link to them.

So, create a number of unique, invaluable how-tos or tuturials that people get access to for free, and they will certainly link to your website (and even tell their friends about it).

Backlink building can be a time consuming and tedious task, but it's absolutely critical to generate traffic to your website. However, it is possible to buy inbound links or link building packages if you have some money to spare. If you can afford it, this will save you much time in your efforts to generate backlinks, and you can concentrate on creating more quality web pages.