Backlinking tips, help a noob.....

Hi Peter

Sorry if i'm been a little lazy but here is a post from my blog that I wrote a while ago, hope it helps.

John

Link building seems to be the bane of a webmasters life! And I think that most people don't have a clue where to start,

The first part of your link building strategy should always be knowing how many back links you need!

I see so many people posting projects for Link Building where they are looking for 500 links or 50 links without really knowing how many they actually need to rank at number one in Google for that particular keyword.

If you get the Free Market Samurai keyword tool you can use the competition part of the tool to give you a very good indication of exactly how many links you need back to your site to get that exclusive #1 spot. Another way would be to install SeoQuake - seo toolbar, plugin, seo extension for Mozilla Firefox in your Firefox Browser and look at the top ten results for your keyword and find out from there.

This only gives you an idea of how many you need because all links are not treated equally, a link from a high authority site is always better than a link with no authority.

The second part of your strategy should be to make sure that the page your are trying to rank is fully optimized for that keyword (on page optimisation) because if it's not it will be much harder to rank.

On Page Optimisation is what is required to change a website itself to make it more likely to get higher rankings for a particular keyword (or set of keywords) in the search engines.

It includes such things as improving the page content, using keywords in page titles, using ALT tags for images (i.e. keywords in the text description for an image) and managing outgoing links.

As you build your pages your keyword phrase needs to correspond to that page, make sure the :

Page name
Page heading title
Page title meta tag
Page description meta tag
Page key word meta tag

all use your keyword or Keyword phrase.

The third and final part is to go out and get those links coming in but before I go into that I would like to debunk a couple of the myths surrounding link building:

The sites you link to must be relevant!

Rubbish, relevancy is very important but only for visitors clicking straight through from your link on someone else's site but the search engines look more at the number of links and the authority of the sites that they come from far more than the sites relevance, the relevance comes in the form of the anchor text that you use more than the relevance of the site that the link is on, which matters for rankings.

There is a much more in-depth article here: The relevant link myth

Only link to high PR pages

Some people think that if your link is on a page that has 0PR although the home page has a high page rank, you will not benefit, this is totally untrue and has been tested time and time again.
As Matt Cutts from Google stated in an Interview with Stephan Spencer

"Matt Cutts: Typically, our policy is: a link is a link, is a link; wherever that link's worth is, that is the worth that we give it. Some people ask about links from DMOZ, links from .edu or links from .gov, and they say: "Isn't there some sort of boost? Isn't a link better if it comes from a .edu?" The short answer is: no, it is not. It is just .edu links tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to .edu's or .gov's."

You can read the whole interview here. Matt Cutts Interview

Ok, some myths debunked! Now there are dozens of ways to get backlinks to you sites, including:

Compelling Content (Like this!)
Press Releases
Social Bookmarking
Directory Submissions
Article Submissions
Blog Commenting
Forum Posting
RSS Feed Submissions

The major key to a great link building campaign is compelling content it will make you life so much easy if you write great content and that content is picked up by other webmaster and goes viral on it's own accord.

The same with press and article pieces the better written the more exposure they will have and the more backlinks will come back to your site.

Many of these process can be automated but as I said before if you have a great piece of content then that content will get picked up many many more times than a poorly written piece so to save time in the long run put a lot more effort into your content, it's worth it in the end!

To answer the directory submission part of your question, give me the $10 and I will go and buy a couple of drinks with it, it will be just as useful to you.