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Simple Fool-Proof Strategies to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking Part 3: Building Backlinks

Making your website or blog look popular in the eyes of search engine robots is just as important as making it relevant.  That is why there is a second phase to search engine optimization that is off-site. What does off-site optimization entails? It involves building links back to your site. Fairly easy huh?

Yes in my opinion, it is fairly easy but definitely time consuming. You don't need just one or two or ten links to make it weigh as being popular. In order for those links to even count and rank your site high on search engine results, you need hundreds or thousands of strong relevant links.

There are several different strategies that you can use to build one-way backlinks to your site and they are:

1. Article Marketing
You've probably heard this term from other marketers or business owners. Article Marketing is simply a means to build backlinks to your website. It involves writing a 500 word article with related keywords in the title of your article and in the body and submitting it to high PR article directories.

How exactly do you build backlinks by submitting your articles to directories? See, each article directory allows you to submit your website URL together with your article in the "Author" part. There are article directories that allow you to include your links in the body of your article. If this is the case, be sure to read the editorial guidelines of the article directory so you are aware how many links you can include in the body.

In order to make these backlinks relevant, you must find your anchor text  and you will hyperlink that text to your site. Your anchor text will be your keywords or keyphrases. This applies both to the body of your article and the Author part.

So this is what it will look like in HTML code: <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com">your keyword here</a>. There are article directories that have WYSIWYG editors so all you have to do is find the hyperlink icon and it will automatically code it this way for you.

Most article directories only allow two links on the Author section so be creative on how you compose your "About the Author" statement.

Here's an example:

First Name Last Name is an entrepreneur who loves providing <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com">your keyword here</a>. For more information about (keyword here but not hyperlinked), please visit http://www.yourdomain.com.

3. Squidoo Lens
Squidoo.com is a website that allows you to create a web page on a certain topic for free. The web page you create is called a lens. A lens must be informational. Squidoo has a page rank (PR) of 8 and Google absolutely loves it!

I would say that a lens is similar to a blog post, however, it's located within the Squidoo website. It is customizable to a point where you can use what they call "modules" so you can add pizazz and other additional outside information from websites such as Amazon.

The key in successfully backlinking your site from a Squidoo lens is to create a lens that is related to your niche. Use your most important keywords on the title of the lens and incorporate them within your lens. You can then hyperlink 2 or 3 keywords back to your website.

I would suggest not going over more than 2 or 3 backlinks so as not to be considered or blacklisted as a spammer.

To get started, all you have to do is just sign-up for free at Squidoo.com. For more information and a guide to get started, click here.

4. Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is another popular way of building backlinks. There are literally hundreds of social bookmarking websites that emerged, however, there are really only a few that are worth using. Since this is quite a tedious process, I suggest using this free web-based tool called Social Marker. It is allows you to submit to several different bookmarking websites in one location. Another tool (not free) for getting your website social bookmarked is Bookmarking Demon.

5. Forum Signatures
There are some forums that allow you to create signatures where you can "self-promote". Find forums that are related to your niche and be sure to read their guidelines in creating signatures. Usually, you are allowed to integrate keywords and anchor them with links back to your site. On some forums, you must have at least 10 posts first before you can create a signature so be sure to check out their terms and conditions.

6. Blog Commenting
Blog commenting can also be rewarding in your SEO efforts. If you can find at least 5 blogs in your niche, regularly making comments on those blogs can significantly help your backlinking. Most blog owners need to approve your comment first prior to being published. The key to making sure your comment gets approved is to make intelligent and valuable or helpful comments that are related to the topic. Do not just say "Nice post, thank you for sharing!" There are commenting softwares that spam comment section on blogs and this is what they usually put. To avoid being considered as spam and to get approved, contribute valuable information.

3 Keys in Building Backlinks

In the above methods, there are three keys to making your backlink buidling successful and they are:

1. Page Rank
Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important a web page is on the web. If there are lots of backlinks to that website, then the page rank is higher. Find niche-related websites or blogs that have a high PR.

You can find out a site's page rank by using this web-based PR Checker Tool or if you use Firefox, use this SEO Firefox extension.
 

2. Do Follow
Do Follow simply means that a website or a blog is not using  the rel="nofollow" tag which is a code that tells the search engine robots to not count that link as an important link to the the site that it's linked to.

If the site is not using the "nofollow" tag, it means that any backlinks created from that site is counted as important. So makes sure that the sites you are building links from are "do follow."

How do you know if the site is a do follow? For blogs, some of them like mine have Comment Luv enabled which is a do-follow plugin. You can also use a Firefox extension called NoDoFollow. When enabled on your Firefox browser, this plugin highlights the nofollow links in pink and the dofollow links in purple. If links are in purple, that means that the website is a dofollow.
 

3. Anchor Text
If you're simply posting your URL in building your links, it's not counting towards the keywords that you're trying to get higher ranking for. Be sure to anchor your keywords.

Hope this strategies help you! Please don't forget to show me some love! Retweet, FB like, or Digg!

Until then!…

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