How To Get Natural Backlinks?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.