The Get Paid Site

Probably one of the most difficult parts of increasing your website’s Google pagerank is getting quality backlinks. A backlink is when a hyperlink on another website links to yours. Think of it as basically a voting system. Every website that links to your site is considered a vote and thus making it “more important” in the eyes of the search engines.

Many people suggest writing to the webmaster’s of sites with high page rank to get them to include your link. Well, I say boo to that! To me, this is just another form of spamming. I get these “link request” emails for sites I run and they always seem like the person is begging even if the site they have a good website. 99% of the time these requests get ignored.

So, lets take a look at 5 other methods to get backlinks to your site:

1. Comment, comment and comment some more! This is by far a much better way to gain exposure to your site then a cold-call email. Take the time to read the postings of other sites you like and make relevant comments in the comment section with a link to your site. Even if the other site has a no-follow link added, other webmaster’s generally check out the sites of people who commented and if they like your site, they will include you on their link list.
2. List yourself in relevant directories. There are many free directories that you can submit your site too that will provide you with a high quality backlinks. If you run a blog, try MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog and Blogflux among others. There are other directories such as Yahoo directory that you may have to pay for, but might be worth it in the long run.
3. Write articles and add your site URL in the byline. A well-written and useful article can be submitted to the following sites: Article City, GoArticles, Submit Your Articles and Ezine Articles. This is a great way to generate backlinks because other webmaster’s can use your article which includes a link to your site. This can be quite a viral way to get your link out there if many sites use your article.
4. Social bookmark your site. While I don’t suggest spamming these sites, I don’t see any harm in a bit of self-promotion of your site. Submit a quality article from your site at as many social bookmarking sites as you wish. While this might seem tedious, it’s worth it because you get a pretty high pagerank backlink from these sites. Use a tool such as Social Poster which can help you submit your link to multiple sites at once.
5. Create a Squidoo Lens.A Squidoo lens is great because they rank so high in google searches. Even new lens has a pagerank or 4 to 5 once they are published. This can be significantly higher than your current site, especially if it’s a new site. Also, include your blog’s RSS feed in the lens so it always stays fresh with the links back to your recent articles. Bonus - uou can even get paid while you’re at it.

The best part about these methods is that you can do it all on your own. You don’t necessarily need someone else to add the backlinks for you.

Related Articles:

• Get Paid to Squidoo
• 3 Important Things to Know Before Starting a Blog
• Leveraging Long Tail Keywords to Increase Traffic

Filed under: Blogging, Increase Traffic, SEO on February 4th, 2008