How To Get Natural Backlinks?

[Shaunman]

I hear it all the time, "build a site that people love and they will naturally link to you" Is this a myth or fact. I have seen a few people link to my site, but I don't think it happens enough to really make a big impact in my rankings.

How do you get more people to link to you? Any tips or advice? What qualifies as "link worthy content" that will naturally get backlinks? And how much can you expect from natural backlinks?

Also should I be participating more in social bookmarketing sites in order to get natural backlinks? I know a lot of bloggers hang out there.

Thanks

[bgmacaw]

I think people fall into the "build it and they will come" trap when they talk about natural links. You still have to promote the site, either through basic SEO techniques, paid advertising or social media. That's what people miss.

[HunterSnake]

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

I think people fall into the "build it and they will come" trap when they talk about natural links. You still have to promote the site, either through basic SEO techniques, paid advertising or social media. That's what people miss.

One must promote their web site... this is with certainty. However, they must also make sure that they have content worthy of word-of-mouth circulation or the only links one may acquire to their site are the ones that they themselves create. Links won't be created organically to a web site unless people actually like the web site, so focusing entirely on promotion is bad.

A lot of people spend all of their time promoting their web site but no time actually working on their web site and creating well-written, SEO rich content. Instead, they only try to impress search engines with all sorts of tactics that either don't work at all or are often potentially detrimental. The sites that rank best in Google generally are the ones that were designed to impress people.

Sure, spam ranks well temporarily sometimes, but more and more of those web sites are vanishing from the SERPs every day as big networks of micro-sites and spam chains continue to be brought down by the anti-spam divisions of the major search engines. The owners of these networks end up here asking why their domain/network/whatever vanished from / was severely penalized by [insert search engine name here].

The holistic approach to achieving web popularity often takes longer... but the rewards tend to last longer, too...

Just my two cents...

One of the more recent videos from Matt Cutts addresses the issue of people focusing entirely on search engines rather than people pretty well. His rant was valid, in my opinion... Considering he's made these points in every other video he has released, on his blog, etc., but people don't seem to want to listen...

YouTube- What is the best way to check your own...

[timpears]

I am by no means an expert, but in my opinion, the only certain way to get people to link to you is to hire a VA to do the back links for you. OR, write news articles, and I don't mean news releases. I mean articles that appear in Google News. And that is a whole 'nother process.

Putting the 'dig this' or other social bookmarking buttons on your site might help get folks to social bookmark your site. I don't know how productive this would be. I have not tried it, but I see it frequently.

I could be totally wrong, I don't know. But this is my line of thinking.

[JacksonRiddle]

I submit my rss feed to free directories and hope that people will then take my feed and put it on their site.

I'm quite new on the IM scene but Im hearing this is a good way to go about it

[gameutopia]

You can get natural links if your site has good content and is popular, but you have to be extremely popular to get a decent flow of them. That matt cutts guy is always rambling on about doing things and getting links naturally. That might be true in google's case, but for the little guy/girl or site it is easier said than done.

[KC-Coop]

If you want natural backlinks you're going to have to write really quality content that is worth linking too.

However - even if you build a masterpiece of content you still need to promote it somehow.

Maybe start with a social media campaign? Get active on Twitter, and commenting on other blogs in your niche (which builds backlinks anyway).

You need traffic to get natural links - so you have to get it somehow. Once you have some traffic - write really quality content and you'll get links.

You can also try writing some linkbait articles and submitting them to all of the social bookmarking sites.

[roxstar]

Originally Posted by Shaunman

I hear it all the time, "build a site that people love and they will naturally link to you" Is this a myth or fact.

It is true, people will stumble upon your content by accident if you aren't promoting. But you do get more traction if you go out there are drag them to your site.

Originally Posted by Shaunman

I have seen a few people link to my site, but I don't think it happens enough to really make a big impact in my rankings.

There are two schools of thought on this... SEO and social media.

Social media guys like Gary Vaynerchuk don't rely on SEO, they rely on other people spreading the word for them. The internet just put that on steroids. They work long-term and build a brand based on quality & standards -- otherwise their brand wouldn't get big.

Then there are SEO guys like Stompernet. Who use SEO (their version of it is called "Aggressive Whitehat".) They build links, get ranked in Google, Yahoo, and Bing and somewhat from their links.

There are also hybrids... But you get the point.

Originally Posted by Shaunman

How do you get more people to link to you? Any tips or advice?

You ask them. You give them a clear "call to action." This could be "Follow Me," or "Subscribe," or "Email This. Use your imagination.

Sometimes it's just as easy as asknig them to link to you, some people would do it.

Originally Posted by Shaunman

And how much can you expect from natural backlinks?

Not much for SEO standards, but a lot from social standards.

You seem to like SEO, so it wouldn't be too much...

Originally Posted by Shaunman

Also should I be participating more in social bookmarketing sites in order to get natural backlinks? I know a lot of bloggers hang out there.

I usually just get backlinks there, but it couldn't hurt to get involved in them. A lot of bloggers do hang out there.

Hope this helped,
Kris Roxas

[l2ascal]

I would use blog commenting and provide relevant comments that appeal towards your targeted audience. There are many relevant backlinking services that I wouldn't consider spammy. I will be launching my own here shortly.

[FreshPLR]

Some very interesting comments here. I would say you need to take a balanced approach rather than go flat out for social media or exclusively for SE traffic.

Good quality content that human visitors enjoy which they want to share with others is of course very important. Equally you need to promote via article writing and blog posts as well as answering questions (with linkback) and generous use of RSS feeds.

[JohnMcCabe]

I'm probably one of the biggest advocates for natural linking that you'll find around here.

The truth is, the "build it and they will come" works about as well as using a buggy whip on a Ford.

Even an avalanche has some sort of catalyst, some event that starts things moving.

I'd say that the two things required for a significant number of natural links are content worth linking to and getting that content the attention of promiscuous natural linkers. Many times, that means bloggers and content aggregators. Blogs, even autoblogs that play fair, podcasts and their directories, RSS directories, video bloggers and their directories, and so on.

On a tangent, does anyone remember Google saying that they were trying to evaluate videos by the actual content of the video rather than just the description? And did you notice the Cutts video above had what looked like closed captions? I wonder if there's any connection...

[JakeRhodes]

Originally Posted by Shaunman

I hear it all the time, "build a site that people love and they will naturally link to you" Is this a myth or fact. I have seen a few people link to my site, but I don't think it happens enough to really make a big impact in my rankings.

How do you get more people to link to you? Any tips or advice? What qualifies as "link worthy content" that will naturally get backlinks? And how much can you expect from natural backlinks?

Also should I be participating more in social bookmarketing sites in order to get natural backlinks? I know a lot of bloggers hang out there.

Thanks

It's something of a myth really since you need people to find your content before they can love it and naturally link to you.

Haven't you heard that natural backlinking is dead? It's been almost conclusively proved that you can use the same anchor text for every link you build, on completely irrelevant sites and get very high (even #1) ranking on Google.