How To Add Backlinks To Your Website

Asking “how to add backlinks” is like asking “how do I make my car faster?” Your race car builder always has a simple answer: Horsepower costs money. How much do you want to spend?

Okay, maybe I’m being a little facetious here, but it really isn’t far from the truth. Linkbuilding is either going to cost you time or money. No one gets backlinks for free regardless of the BS the “gurus” are putting out (just before they sell you their $2,000 package “deal”).

Yes, I know, you’ve probably read articles on how to get free backlinks and maybe some of you were hoping you’d get some of that advice in this article. Instead, I’m going to give you the cold, hard truth. You’re either going to have to invest a lot of your time building backlinks, hire someone else to build backlinks, or use a service or automated software to build backlinks.

Either way, it’s going to cost you time or someone else’s time or spending money on software or services.

Now that you’ve had the cold shower, let’s look at some of the options available to you. first we’ll look at the free options for building backlinks and then we’ll discuss how to add backlinks with the paid services and automated software.

How to add backlinks

These are the methods you use when your time is worth less than your money. in that case, I would focus on blog commenting. It’s one of the most effective ways I know of to build links, Google loves them, and you can sometimes get lucky and hit the jackpot with a link from a high pagerank blog.

Get a gravatar

First, you have to have a gravatar. It’s that little square picture that shows up next to people’s comments on blogs. Go to Gravatar and sign up for one. It’s fast, easy and free.

Use an email address that you aren’t going to use for anything else. In the case of this website, I used info at cheap-seo-website-marketing.com. I don’t use that email for anything else. Just blog commenting. You should do the same thing.

Set up your Google Alerts

Next, go to Google Alerts and set up alerts for each of your keyword phrases on your website (or at least the ones you really want to promote). Again, it’s fast and easy to set up Google Alerts and it’s free.

When you set it up, make sure you set it up for blog posts only. Otherwise, you’ll get alerts on every press release, article, or other non-commentable item that comes across the Internet. And tell Google you want the alerts once a day.

They will come to your email inbox every morning. Just click on each link and see what the blog says and whether they accept comments. You also want to make sure that they will let you have a link back to your website. And preferably, there are other comments on the blog so you know there are actual readers.

How to do blog commenting to get a useful backlink…

Where it asks for your name, use the keyword phrase the Google Alert was sent for. That way your keyword phrase will be your anchor text. Then just add in your blog commenting email and your website address. If the keyword phrase is for one of your inner pages and not your home page, be sure to use that page’s URL for the website address.

Use the Free Version of Directory Submitter

This should be next on your free links agenda. Directory Submitter is a free software for submitting your website to online directories. When you get a little moola together, I suggest you get the full paid version. The free version lists 350 sites. The paid one lists over 900.

Free Social Bookmarking Service

Sign up for SocialADR. They have a free version where you bookmark other people’s websites to earn credits that you can use to get other people to bookmark your websites and pages. Great swap deal. Google isn’t impressed when you bookmark your own stuff but getting other people to bookmark your pages, that’s gold. I use the paid version but, of course, I believe time is money and the backlinks more than pay for the service.

How to Add Backlinks with Article Marketing

Article marketing or as it’s sometimes called, “bum marketing” (as in, so easy a bum could do it), is a great way to get backlinks (albeit, a slow way). Simply write as many articles as you can and submit them to article directories across the Internet. There are plenty of article directories to choose from but I recommend the following list because they have a high pagerank and high Alexa rank.

Ezine Articles
Articles Base
Buzzle
GO articles
Article Alley
Article Dashboard
Article Click
Amazines
Article Nexus
Articles Sphere

Again, I want to impress upon you that Google wants to see your backlinks coming from a diversity of URLs so spread your articles out between these article directories. Also, most of them have a minimum number of articles you need to post to be a featured author. At least post the minimum as soon as you can.

And lastly, read their rules. Some will allow no links within your article, some will allow more than one in the article, and you want to make sure you have a link to the page you want to feature in your Author Box. If they have tutorials, read or watch them.

How To Add Backlinks The Faster and Easier Way (but still safely)

Okay, in this section, we’ll assume you have an online marketing budget but you aren’t the “throw money at it” type of person (because that’s the kind of person I am). And by safely, I mean you aren’t going to tick off Google and find yourself blacklisted using these methods.

Get a gravatar

First, you have to have a gravatar. It’s that little square picture that shows up next to people’s comments on blogs. Go to Gravatar and sign up for one. It’s fast, easy and free.

Use an email address that you aren’t going to use for anything else. In the case of this website, I used info at cheap-seo-website-marketing.com. I don’t use that email for anything else. Just blog commenting. You should do the same thing.

Let’s look at automated blog commenting

Now, when I say automated blog commenting, I don’t mean “and the monkey pushed the button.” In fact, all of the automated methods I’ll teach you here require some set-up and work. The difference is, it takes a lot less time and work and because of the automation, you get one heck of a lot more links for your effort than you do with the “do-it-yourself” methods up above.

Let’s get down to business. There are two different tools available for automated blog commenting. One is called CommentHut and the other is called Lotus Jump. The major differences are, CommentHut is a SEO software you purchase outright. Lotus Jump is a subscription-based online system.

Using CommentHut

It hunts down blogs in WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Hub Pages, Squidoo pages and more. It will list all the blog posts it finds based on the keyword phrase you give it. You can also set it to delete any blog post it finds from a blog with a page rank lower than you request. I have mine set to reject anything below page ranks 3. You can read my full review of CommentHut or go to their website and watch the video to learn more.

Using Lotus Jump

Lotus Jump is more sophisticated than CommentHut. I use them both. I use CommentHut when I’m in a hurry and just want to crank out a few quick blog comments. I use Lotus Jump when I have more time and really want to create a lot of high quality backlinks to my website.

Lotus Jump goes out and finds the right directories, forums, blogs and profile opportunities for you to create links on. It really goes beyond simple blog commenting and gets into PR and creating online “buzz” for your website. It even automates directory submissions.

In other words, you get more for your buck with Lotus Jump. You can read my review of Lotus Jump or you can go direct to their website and watch the video on how it works.

Creating backlinks with paid reviews

Paid reviews are a great way to get backlinks from PR 3 blogs. The tough part is finding people to do that for you. Luckily, we have Sponsored Reviews.

I actually found out about Sponsored Reviews from a client who asked me if it was a good idea. By the time I got through trying it for myself, I was sold on it. Here’s how it works…

You sign up as a person looking for reviews of your website, product or service. People with blogs sign up to do reviews. The potential reviewers bid on how much they are willing to write the review for based on the page rank of their blog.

On average, the lowest page rank bloggers will do a review for you for about 5 bucks. The page rank 3 bloggers will do it for about $20. That’s reasonably cheap for a positive review on a PR3 blog with a link back to your website.

I use this to get some nice PR 3 or better links for my clients and for my sites. You can read my review of Sponsored Reviews or you can check them out by visiting their website.

Use the Paid Version of Directory Submitter

This should be next on your linkbuilding agenda. Directory Submitter is a software for submitting your website to online directories. While the free version lists 350 sites, the paid one lists over 900 business directories. Now that’s a lot of links. I’ll admit, they lost a lot of their luster since Google gave them all the pagerank slap, but they still have value and many of them are still PR 3, 4, or 5.

Paid Social Bookmarking Service

Sign up for SocialADR.

 They have a paid version that lets you just list the pages you want bookmarked and the freebie members will bookmark you pages for you to get credits so they can get their bookmarks posted. Talk about easy money. Google isn’t impressed when you bookmark your own stuff but getting other people to bookmark your pages, that’s gold. I have a friend who owns a dining guide. I suggested he use SocialADR. He tried it and told me he got so much new traffic he had to buy more bandwidth from his host to accommodate all the new traffic. I call that money well spent.

Blog and Article Marketing with SEO Linkvine and The Best Spinner

Google has recently made it clear that they are even more focused now on delivering targeted content to searchers. So I consider SEO Linkvine my ace in the hole.

I do a lot of article marketing because as I said, Google is getting even more focused on content. So I need to create a lot of unique content quickly. For that I use The Best Article Spinner.

Here’s what I do

I write a quick article of 350 to 550 words using my word processor software. Next, I copy and paste that article into a text file. In my case, that would be Notepad. Then I open The Best Spinner and bring the text article into it. I use The Best Spinner to create a spin-able version of the article. (To learn more about how The Best Spinner works, please download this free manual I created for it).

I then upload the spun article into SEO Linkvine, insert my links into the article, and set it up with tags. Then “the monkey pushes the button.” Depending on the subject matter, this usually garners me anywhere from 5-10 new links per week and sometimes more. For as long as I stay a member, I just keep getting links.

And these links are all unique posts on related blogs with my anchor text link back to my site. That’s just like money in the bank.

On top of which, I can use The Best Spinner to spin the article into 250 versions for me to upload to article directories like the ones listed above.

Using an Article Submitter

Okay, here’s my view on using an article submitter. I can tell you right now as an SEO professional that using an article submitter won’t do anything for you in terms of boosting you in the search engines. Duplicate content is worthless for that.

Now, having said that, using an article submitter still gets your article spread all over the place on article directories where people go and search for articles on topics they are interested in. So it can still be a real boon as far as targeted traffic goes. And let’s face it. Targeted traffic is all we are really interested in. That’s why we want our pages on first page of Google.

And that’s why we are putting all that content out there. To get targeted buyers to our website. So as long as you are using other backlink methods, I say definitely use an article submitter.

Super-Secret-Ultimate-Linkbuilding-Scheme

Okay. I can count on one hand the number of clients I’ve told this high PR link creation technique to. And it doesn’t cost a dime.

As you may or may not know, quality linkbacks beat quantity linkbacks every time. So here’s my super-secret trick I use to get high PR links for myself and my clients.

Newspapers may be dying all over the country but their websites are so crammed with constantly updating content that they have amazing pagerank and Alexa rank. But did you know that many of them let you sign up for free and create a fabulous profile with links back to your websites? And even better than that, quite a few of them let you create your own blog on their website (and blogroll for even more links to your websites).

So here’s what you do. Start looking up newspaper websites and find the ones that allow you to create a profile  and a blog. Cram as much information in the profile as you can and then start a blog. Post new articles to the blog every couple of days with links in each one to other newspaper blogs you’ve created and pages on your websites.

Maybe put up some posts with links to your social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, PDFCast, Flickr, YouTube, etc., to create an interlinked web or linkvine as they sometimes call them. This will do more for you than you can imagine for both traffic and SEO. Good luck!!!

PS One last point. Most of the software listed here is relatively cheap considering the number of links they will get you and the amount of targeted traffic they will bring to your website. But this is the most expensive software in the world if you get it and then it just sits there on your hard drive doing nothing. You still have to use it. You still have to open them every day and invest some time and work with them.

If you use them, they’ll make you lots of money. If you don’t, they’ll just leave you broke.