High Quality Backlinks
- ARTICLES |
Once you have carried out your initial indexing efforts, the next step is to start basing backlinks in content. That is, creating and using your own content to establish backlinks and drive traffic to your site.
However, unlike the methods and strategies we discussed in High Traffic Academy, this section will focus on how offsite content can be used to build backlinks to your site. That is, you will learn several strategies for putting content in other places around the web, which can then be used to drive traffic to your site and, hence, your product.
Content vs. Volume
Before we get into the specifics of the strategies, though, I want to once again mention the importance of quality.
I know this has been gone over at length in High Traffic Academy, as well as earlier in High Traffic Academy when we talked about Panda and Penguin. You may be tired of hearing it, but it's extremely important, so I'm going to stress it again - quality and authority are much more important these days when it comes to content than volume.
Mass backlinking programs like Xrumer and SEONuke, among others, are no longer effective in today's Internet landscape. These programs make use of things like forum spam and content scraping to propagate backlinks. We already discussed way back in the beginning of High Traffic Academy why efforts like that won't work - because they are targeted by Panda and Penguin. Although once popular and effective, these programs - and other kinds of Internet marketing efforts that emphasize sheer volume at the cost of quality - are now to be avoided.
Yes, in backlinking, volume also matters. You need enough content out there that it is discoverable and drives audiences to you. However, it is far important that the content you generate and put out on the web be of high quality than high quantity. Panda and Penguin are part of this, because they will downgrade pages with bad or duplicate content no matter where they appear, but you also have to consider the mechanism by which these strategies work.
When you put content out in the channels we're going to talk about - Web 2.0 sites, article directories, blog comments and guest blog posts - your goal is not just to boost your page rank through quality backlinks, but also to get people to click through to your site. After all, a high page rank isn't very useful if it doesn't generate any revenue for you.
In order for people to click the backlinks, they have to want to do so, which means they have to like the content they just read. At least, they have to be able to read it. So, it must be worth reading and not a bunch of bot-generated gobbledygook.
What you will learn with these strategies is how to put your backlink content in places where it will be indexed frequently and viewed by large audiences, but also tricks to help you produce a healthy volume of that content in an efficient way.
Web 2.0
The term "Web 2.0" is one of those ones that gets bandied about a lot, to the point that many people probably don't even really know what it means. As it happens, there's nothing shameful about not being sure of the definition, as there is a fairly large debate about it anyway, so it really lacks a single, unifying definition.
Joining that debate is outside the scope of High Traffic Academy, and really it doesn't matter much for the purposes of building backlinks. For now, let's just say that Web 2.0 sites are built upon characteristics of participation, decentralization and openness.
These traits are precisely what make them great for sharing content and generating backlinks. Let's look at how we can use a few of them
Squidoo
Squidoo is probably the most popular Web 2.0 site for SEO and backlinking. This is because it has several desirable traits that we want in a link source. Namely, it is:
Using Squidoo to build backlinks is simple:
Because creating a lens is so easy and fast, you can create several of them to build your backlink portfolio. Don't overdo it, because that could hurt you by being seen as spam, but feel free to make at least a couple.
HubPages
Much like Squidoo, HubPages gives Internet users a platform to post their own authoritative niche content easily and for free. In fact, HubPages works in much the same way, except that individual pages are called "hubs" instead of pages, and the content tends to be longer than that on Squidoo.
You can use it in exactly the same way - just sign up a free account and start posting backlinked content. You can even use the same basic content as on Squidoo, provided that you spin and rewrite it enough that Panda does not view it as duplicate content. (We'll talk more about how to use spun content in just a bit, and for information on how to spin your content, refer to High Traffic Academy.)
Tumblr
Tumblr is blogging platform that is renowned for its simplicity and ease of use, while still being media-friendly. The thing that makes Tumblr truly unique is its built-in blog network and content sharing feature, called reblogging.
Every post on Tumblr can be reblogged, meaning that a viewer is shares that content on his or her own Tumblr blog. The beauty part is that when you reblog someone else's post, a note shows up at the bottom of that post with a link to your Tumblr.
Here's how you can harness that sharing to generate traffic via backlinks.
Once you have a good amount of content with backlinks, start exploring other user's blogs. From your Tumblr dashboard, click on the "Explore Tumblr" link in the right sidebar:
At the main explore page, just below the fold is a listing of blog topic groups, arranged by popularity. Use this to find popular Tumblr blogs to reblog.
Once you have found some worthwhile blogs with content to share, it's time to reblog. From within the Tumblr site, you will see that each post has a few icons in the upper right corner. The one that looks like two arrows in a cycle is the reblog feature.
After clicking that, follow the on-screen steps to complete the reblog, and voila! Now there is a link to your Tumblr in the notes section of the blog you just shared from. (As an alternative, you can also click the heart icon to "like" the post, which will also give a similar link in the notes section.)
Keep your Tumblr blog updated with fresh content in order to prevent Google from bypassing it when it crawls. This also encourages people to keep up with your content - remember how we mentioned participation as being one of the characteristics of Web 2.0?
While this Tumblr method is indirect, because potential visitors have to go through your Tumblr blog to get to your main site, it is still quite effective both for improving visibility in SERPs and encouraging visitation. You can also set your Tumblr to be associated with a custom domain.
Article Marketing
The next strategy we're going to get into is very powerful one for building backlinks based on your content. It involves submitting articles to directory sites in order to take advantage of those sites' existing traffic and rank in SERPs, and there are a few tricks to it that will make your life easier.
The idea is similar to what we discussed about Squidoo and HubPages, when I mentioned that you can use spun content to create a number of lenses and hubs. As it turns out, in fact, Squidoo and HubPages are themselves two of the highest ranked article directory sites on the web.
The difference here is that I am going to show you in more depth how you can use spun content, as well as ways to get your content submitted to way more directories than just those two - even as many as a few hundred at a time.
Before getting started, note that properly employing these strategies hinges on being able to spin content, so if you need to look back inside High Traffic Academy, now would be a good time.
This screenshot is a listing of 20 of the top article directory sites, clipped from a larger list of 50. You'll notice among the top at least three sites that have been mentioned already in High Traffic Academy - Squidoo, HubPages and Technorati. Even excluding those - because you have probably already used them in your initial indexing and content-based backlinking to this point - there are 17 other usable article sites for you right there, some with PageRanks as high as 8! Those are some great places for you to plant some links. Let's look at one way to do that.
Write an article, including spintax. This will form the spine of the content you are going to submit to these article sites. Make sure to include some anchor text for your links.
Spin the article to generate a unique version of it for the first site - let's say Ezine Articles. Save this version of the content. Review it to ensure it makes sense and meets editorial guidelines. Yes, this will take a couple minutes, but it's still faster than generating totally unique articles for every site and it beats getting nailed by Panda and Penguin.
Submit the article to Ezine Articles, being sure as you do so the insert links to your site behind the anchor text.
With the article submitted on place, move down the list. Let's make ArticleBase our next stop.
Take the original article with spintax and spin it again. You will want to spin it a few times in between uses to ensure uniqueness. I recommend at least three spins.
Review the content again to make sure it makes sense. Sometimes you can make an error in the spintax that will throw off the meaning and call for small edits. It only takes a minute or two, and can be the difference between a boom in traffic and being penalized as a spammer.
Submit the content to ArticleBase, again making sure to follow guidelines and insert those backlinks.
Repeat this process - steps 4 through 7 - to other top article directory sites.
This creates a healthy sized portfolio of well positioned backlinks in a minimal amount of time. These sites get a lot of traffic and are crawled by Google frequently, so your backlinks get indexed and count for your site big time.
In a moment I'm going to show you a way you can make this process even faster and submit to hundreds of article sites at once, which will really get the ball moving on your content-based backlinks. Before we get into that, though, I want to briefly say some thins about using spun content, since that was the second time I've mentioned it - and it won't be the last.
Using Spun Content
Article spinners are an easy and quick way to effectively turn one piece of content into many different articles. It saves time on the content generation side, while still serving the purpose of giving you unique content.
There are, however, some caveats to using spun content that you need to be aware of:
Only spin and submit your own content. Taking someone else's content, spinning it and submitting it as your own is a no-no. Even if you go heavy on the spintax and spin it five times, it's still not the same as your own content. Consider two questions. First, how do you know the author didn't do that same thing alredy and you've just unwittingly created duplicate (or close) content? Second, is that really easier than writing 500 words of your own?
Always review your spun content before submitting. It takes an extra minute or two, but if you catch even one glaring mistake, it can be worth it. Mistakes happen, but Google still sometimes thinks they are spam.
Compare a piece of spun content to previous iterations to ensure uniqueness. Don't be afraid to move some paragraphs around, too.
Don't think uniqueness is a substitute for quality. There are lots of unique pieces of content out there that are terrible, because they are poorly written. Bad grammar, bad spelling, misplaced keywords - these all make for bad content that can be punished by Google. Uniqueness is important, but you must have quality, too.
We are going to talk about another way to use spun content when we get into guest posting on blogs, so take note of these guidelines and follow them whenever you use content that you have spun. It can however be used quite effectively with article directories and web 2.0 sites.
Tired of building backlinks? Looking for other ways to get targeted traffic? How about getting 100,000 targeted visitors to your website today? Impossible? I'll show you how I made $48,333 in a single week - click HERE.
However, unlike the methods and strategies we discussed in High Traffic Academy, this section will focus on how offsite content can be used to build backlinks to your site. That is, you will learn several strategies for putting content in other places around the web, which can then be used to drive traffic to your site and, hence, your product.
Content vs. Volume
Before we get into the specifics of the strategies, though, I want to once again mention the importance of quality.
I know this has been gone over at length in High Traffic Academy, as well as earlier in High Traffic Academy when we talked about Panda and Penguin. You may be tired of hearing it, but it's extremely important, so I'm going to stress it again - quality and authority are much more important these days when it comes to content than volume.
Mass backlinking programs like Xrumer and SEONuke, among others, are no longer effective in today's Internet landscape. These programs make use of things like forum spam and content scraping to propagate backlinks. We already discussed way back in the beginning of High Traffic Academy why efforts like that won't work - because they are targeted by Panda and Penguin. Although once popular and effective, these programs - and other kinds of Internet marketing efforts that emphasize sheer volume at the cost of quality - are now to be avoided.
Yes, in backlinking, volume also matters. You need enough content out there that it is discoverable and drives audiences to you. However, it is far important that the content you generate and put out on the web be of high quality than high quantity. Panda and Penguin are part of this, because they will downgrade pages with bad or duplicate content no matter where they appear, but you also have to consider the mechanism by which these strategies work.
When you put content out in the channels we're going to talk about - Web 2.0 sites, article directories, blog comments and guest blog posts - your goal is not just to boost your page rank through quality backlinks, but also to get people to click through to your site. After all, a high page rank isn't very useful if it doesn't generate any revenue for you.
In order for people to click the backlinks, they have to want to do so, which means they have to like the content they just read. At least, they have to be able to read it. So, it must be worth reading and not a bunch of bot-generated gobbledygook.
What you will learn with these strategies is how to put your backlink content in places where it will be indexed frequently and viewed by large audiences, but also tricks to help you produce a healthy volume of that content in an efficient way.
Web 2.0
The term "Web 2.0" is one of those ones that gets bandied about a lot, to the point that many people probably don't even really know what it means. As it happens, there's nothing shameful about not being sure of the definition, as there is a fairly large debate about it anyway, so it really lacks a single, unifying definition.
Joining that debate is outside the scope of High Traffic Academy, and really it doesn't matter much for the purposes of building backlinks. For now, let's just say that Web 2.0 sites are built upon characteristics of participation, decentralization and openness.
These traits are precisely what make them great for sharing content and generating backlinks. Let's look at how we can use a few of them
Squidoo
Squidoo is probably the most popular Web 2.0 site for SEO and backlinking. This is because it has several desirable traits that we want in a link source. Namely, it is:
- Well trafficked
- Easy to use
- Free to join and post content
- The idea behind Squidoo is simple - everyone is an expert on some topic or another, so it gives people a platform to share that expertise. That also means it is a platform to share links to your site within that content.
Using Squidoo to build backlinks is simple:
- Create an account. It's free and fast.
- Build a page - called a "lens" - that fits in your niche. Squidoo includes simple, intuitive tools for adding media to your content.
- In any logical place in that lens, insert some anchor text that contains a link back to your site.
- It's really as simple as that. Now that link lives forever, connecting back to your site, and Google indexes it and counts it as a vote, which helps your rank. Anyone who reads the lens will see this link, which can drive traffic to your site.
Because creating a lens is so easy and fast, you can create several of them to build your backlink portfolio. Don't overdo it, because that could hurt you by being seen as spam, but feel free to make at least a couple.
HubPages
Much like Squidoo, HubPages gives Internet users a platform to post their own authoritative niche content easily and for free. In fact, HubPages works in much the same way, except that individual pages are called "hubs" instead of pages, and the content tends to be longer than that on Squidoo.
You can use it in exactly the same way - just sign up a free account and start posting backlinked content. You can even use the same basic content as on Squidoo, provided that you spin and rewrite it enough that Panda does not view it as duplicate content. (We'll talk more about how to use spun content in just a bit, and for information on how to spin your content, refer to High Traffic Academy.)
Tumblr
Tumblr is blogging platform that is renowned for its simplicity and ease of use, while still being media-friendly. The thing that makes Tumblr truly unique is its built-in blog network and content sharing feature, called reblogging.
Every post on Tumblr can be reblogged, meaning that a viewer is shares that content on his or her own Tumblr blog. The beauty part is that when you reblog someone else's post, a note shows up at the bottom of that post with a link to your Tumblr.
Here's how you can harness that sharing to generate traffic via backlinks.
- Sign up for a Tumblr account. As with the Squidoo and HubPages, it is easy and free.
- Start posting content to your Tumblr blog, with backlinks that point to your site.
Once you have a good amount of content with backlinks, start exploring other user's blogs. From your Tumblr dashboard, click on the "Explore Tumblr" link in the right sidebar:
At the main explore page, just below the fold is a listing of blog topic groups, arranged by popularity. Use this to find popular Tumblr blogs to reblog.
Once you have found some worthwhile blogs with content to share, it's time to reblog. From within the Tumblr site, you will see that each post has a few icons in the upper right corner. The one that looks like two arrows in a cycle is the reblog feature.
After clicking that, follow the on-screen steps to complete the reblog, and voila! Now there is a link to your Tumblr in the notes section of the blog you just shared from. (As an alternative, you can also click the heart icon to "like" the post, which will also give a similar link in the notes section.)
Keep your Tumblr blog updated with fresh content in order to prevent Google from bypassing it when it crawls. This also encourages people to keep up with your content - remember how we mentioned participation as being one of the characteristics of Web 2.0?
While this Tumblr method is indirect, because potential visitors have to go through your Tumblr blog to get to your main site, it is still quite effective both for improving visibility in SERPs and encouraging visitation. You can also set your Tumblr to be associated with a custom domain.
Article Marketing
The next strategy we're going to get into is very powerful one for building backlinks based on your content. It involves submitting articles to directory sites in order to take advantage of those sites' existing traffic and rank in SERPs, and there are a few tricks to it that will make your life easier.
The idea is similar to what we discussed about Squidoo and HubPages, when I mentioned that you can use spun content to create a number of lenses and hubs. As it turns out, in fact, Squidoo and HubPages are themselves two of the highest ranked article directory sites on the web.
The difference here is that I am going to show you in more depth how you can use spun content, as well as ways to get your content submitted to way more directories than just those two - even as many as a few hundred at a time.
Before getting started, note that properly employing these strategies hinges on being able to spin content, so if you need to look back inside High Traffic Academy, now would be a good time.
This screenshot is a listing of 20 of the top article directory sites, clipped from a larger list of 50. You'll notice among the top at least three sites that have been mentioned already in High Traffic Academy - Squidoo, HubPages and Technorati. Even excluding those - because you have probably already used them in your initial indexing and content-based backlinking to this point - there are 17 other usable article sites for you right there, some with PageRanks as high as 8! Those are some great places for you to plant some links. Let's look at one way to do that.
Write an article, including spintax. This will form the spine of the content you are going to submit to these article sites. Make sure to include some anchor text for your links.
Spin the article to generate a unique version of it for the first site - let's say Ezine Articles. Save this version of the content. Review it to ensure it makes sense and meets editorial guidelines. Yes, this will take a couple minutes, but it's still faster than generating totally unique articles for every site and it beats getting nailed by Panda and Penguin.
Submit the article to Ezine Articles, being sure as you do so the insert links to your site behind the anchor text.
With the article submitted on place, move down the list. Let's make ArticleBase our next stop.
Take the original article with spintax and spin it again. You will want to spin it a few times in between uses to ensure uniqueness. I recommend at least three spins.
Review the content again to make sure it makes sense. Sometimes you can make an error in the spintax that will throw off the meaning and call for small edits. It only takes a minute or two, and can be the difference between a boom in traffic and being penalized as a spammer.
Submit the content to ArticleBase, again making sure to follow guidelines and insert those backlinks.
Repeat this process - steps 4 through 7 - to other top article directory sites.
This creates a healthy sized portfolio of well positioned backlinks in a minimal amount of time. These sites get a lot of traffic and are crawled by Google frequently, so your backlinks get indexed and count for your site big time.
In a moment I'm going to show you a way you can make this process even faster and submit to hundreds of article sites at once, which will really get the ball moving on your content-based backlinks. Before we get into that, though, I want to briefly say some thins about using spun content, since that was the second time I've mentioned it - and it won't be the last.
Using Spun Content
Article spinners are an easy and quick way to effectively turn one piece of content into many different articles. It saves time on the content generation side, while still serving the purpose of giving you unique content.
There are, however, some caveats to using spun content that you need to be aware of:
Only spin and submit your own content. Taking someone else's content, spinning it and submitting it as your own is a no-no. Even if you go heavy on the spintax and spin it five times, it's still not the same as your own content. Consider two questions. First, how do you know the author didn't do that same thing alredy and you've just unwittingly created duplicate (or close) content? Second, is that really easier than writing 500 words of your own?
Always review your spun content before submitting. It takes an extra minute or two, but if you catch even one glaring mistake, it can be worth it. Mistakes happen, but Google still sometimes thinks they are spam.
Compare a piece of spun content to previous iterations to ensure uniqueness. Don't be afraid to move some paragraphs around, too.
Don't think uniqueness is a substitute for quality. There are lots of unique pieces of content out there that are terrible, because they are poorly written. Bad grammar, bad spelling, misplaced keywords - these all make for bad content that can be punished by Google. Uniqueness is important, but you must have quality, too.
We are going to talk about another way to use spun content when we get into guest posting on blogs, so take note of these guidelines and follow them whenever you use content that you have spun. It can however be used quite effectively with article directories and web 2.0 sites.
Tired of building backlinks? Looking for other ways to get targeted traffic? How about getting 100,000 targeted visitors to your website today? Impossible? I'll show you how I made $48,333 in a single week - click HERE.