Getting backlinks is another vitally important part of “how to make a blog”.
At the time of writing according to Market Samurai this blog has 199,767 backlinks.
My blog is approx. 1000 days old, meaning on average it gets 200 new backlinks per day.
What is a backlink?
In simple terms, a backlink is a link on a website or blog that leads back to your website / blog.
And the more backlinks your blog has the better.
Why are backlinks important?
Google puts a lot of emphasis on backlinks. If Google sees many websites / blog are linking to your site then it believes your site is important.
It also helps determine your Google Page Rank, the whereabouts your site appears in the search rankings for your targeted keywords, and they help you gain more natural traffic.
How to find the number of backlinks?
The quickest and easiest way to determine the number of backlinks you have is to use MajesticSEO.
Simply add your domain name and ‘explore’.
Tool to use for finding number of backlinks: MajesticSEO
How To Build Good Quality Backlinks…Easily
Notice we said “good quality”. Google knows where your backlinks originate and doesn’t look too kindly if you buy them from “link farms”, so your only alternative is to find a plentiful supply on your own.
This isn’t difficult it’s just time consuming at first, but once you’ve established an attractive and authoritative blog you’ll soon find it’s getting backlinks without any effort on your part.
Blog Commenting
One of the easiest ways to get backlinks is to find “DoFollow” blogs where you’re allowed to leave a link to your own site after posting a comment. Include your name and anchor text and be sure to link to a relevant article, not just to your home page.
The majority of blog masters moderate comments; they will keep informative and intelligent responses because those comments add to their content. Make sure you do that so they don’t trash your comment – writing “Dis is a frikkin bad sight man, you sound like u need sum Viagra,” doesn’t help anybody!
Your comments should be written in a way that adds to the sites readers experience and if you leave interesting comments, people will click through to your blog post.
Participate regularly and the blogmaster may even ask you to post a guest article which is a sure fire way of getting loads of traffic to your blog. It’s all about reciprocity.
If you need a quick way of finding DoFollow blogs, this is a very useful site: http://followlist.com
CommentLuv Blogs
One of the best ways to get backlinks via commenting is to add your comments to blogs that have the CommenLuv plugin installed.
My good friend Ana (owner of Traffic Generation Café) has listed numerous active blogs that have CommentLuv installed. You can view the list here: CommentLuv Enabled Blog List
RSS Directories
RSS directories are often overlooked by bloggers. They contain infinite amounts of links to other sites and are visited regularly by millions.
Add your blog to RSS feeds manually or automatically – you only have to do it once and the effect is ongoing, bringing you automatic backlinks with no further effort.
Here are some of the best ones:
http://blogdigger.com/add.jsp
http://www.millionrss.com/add-my-feed.php
http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp
http://www.feedage.com/
http://www.urlfanx.com/
Tool to use to increase the backlinks from your RSS feed: RSS Link Bomber
Web Directories
Web directories are not as important as they used to be. Google doesn’t have a directory per se; it says that doing a normal search will bring relevant results.
The Yahoo directory costs $299 to join, with an annual recurring fee. Forget it unless you have money to burn, there are better ways to spend those bucks.
Bing recently launched Editors’ Picks which is a collection of Web pages grouped under different topics (isn’t that a directory?) it’s only available in the US at present – we recommend joining up as it doesn’t cost anything and your blog may be one of the first listed in a particular category.
Despite saying that directories are not as important as they used to be (except to Bing maybe!) the effort it takes to submit your blog to free directories is minimal, do it and forget about it. You still have the opportunity to get high-ranking backlinks from good, well-trafficked directories.
It may take some time before your blog appears as some directories examine each site to ensure its suitability.
Tool to use: Save time by using Directory Maximizer
Social Bookmarking
It’s estimated that 10% of traffic to blogs now comes from social networking sites. Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit do not allow a backlink when you social bookmark your blog post with them, so go with the ones that do such as
http://www.mister-wong.com/
Tool to use: Use Bookmarking Demon to submit blog posts to social bookmarking sites automatically.
Now I could go on and talk about Web 2.0 Sites (i.e. Squidoo) and Guest Posting but these methods take a lot more effort.
You should include them in your overall back-linking strategy.
You can read more about those techniques here:
Create A Hub-Page Mini-Network
You Have Never Guest Posted? Really?
How to Make a Blog: Automate as Much as You Can
Summary of Tools We Use
For finding number of backlinks: MajesticSEO
To increase the backlinks from your RSS feed: RSS Link Bomber
For getting backlinks from Directories: Directory Maximizer
Use Bookmarking Demon to submit blog posts to social bookmarking sites automatically.
You’ve probably noticed we suggest you use automated programs to do a lot of your backlinking, otherwise it becomes a tedious job.
Google looks for diversity of backlinks so the more places you can leave a backlink the better.
Invest in the best tools that can automate all the tedious tasks and that will free your time to do other more important things. You don’t have to buy them all at once, when you first start blogging you won’t be making a significant income. Make a list of which automated tools will be the most useful to you and purchase one a month.
The tools on our list have been verified as reliable. If you discover other tools be sure to fully research them before you buy, don’t be tempted to swoop down on every shiny new object that comes your way – you can waste a lot of money.
The whole idea behind creating your own blog should be about enjoying yourself and using the money you earn to create a better life for you and your family. Blog creation is a business that you run – it shouldn’t run you!
What’s the best advice you have for generating backlinks? Please share your views in the comments below.
In the next post on the series, “How to make a Blog” we shall cover the topic of “Marketing and Traffic”
The previous blog posts in the ‘how to make a blog’ series:
Part One: How To Make A Blog: Getting Your Niche Right Is Crucial
Part Two: How To Make A Blog: Finding The Best Keywords For Your Chosen Niche
Part Three: How To Make A Blog: Monetizing with Affiliate Products
Part Four: How To Make A Blog: Monetizing with Digital Products
Part Five: How To Make A Blog: Choosing a Domain Name and Hosting
Part Six: How To Make A Blog: The Tools I Use To Make A Full-Time Income
Part Seven: How To Make A Blog: Are you Content with Your Written Content?
Part Eight: How To Make A Blog: Perfect Your SEO Habits
Part Eightb: 12 Steps To Boost The SEO Of Your Blog Posts
Andrew is a website builder and helps small businesses with their on-line presence…so they can grow their customer list and increase sales. That’s it! That’s what we do each and every day.
It’s important to build links to your blog just as you would build links to other important pages of your website. In addition to these tactics, be sure to include links to blog content in social media posts. This will help generate traffic and build inbound links.
Nick,
Great points about building links to your social media posts.
What’s your best way to do that?
Andrew
I kind of like to mix it up with a variety of different types of backlinks. I guess I get a little board if I do the same types all the time. Thanks for mentioning RSS directories. I have tried some of them in the past, but it has been a long time.
Ray
Remember the RSS directories is a one-off job.
Andrew
Quote:”RSS directories are often overlooked by bloggers.”
My main issue with rss directorys is that its hard to see if it have any impact on search or traffic.
The major benefit is offcause that it is a one time effort that can bring New traffic each time you publish a post.
I might have submitted to the wrong directorys, but my impression so far when it comes to rss directorys the send very little traffic back to my blog.
I will check out the auto rss submitter, but I am not convinced it can drive any major traffic.
Have you any experince with the RSS Link Bomber recomended in the article?
Bjorn
I use the RSS directories just to build backlinks…not for traffic. The backlinks help my overall search ranking.
Re: RSS LINK Bomber. I do use it and once set up I get over 30 backlinks to each individual post once published.
Andrew
Andrew, I normally use commenting and rss directories and they work well, plus I’ve improved my writing ability and this together took me in one year to decuplicate the monthly traffic to my blog. But I’ve found some other good advices here, like diigo or Bing Editors which I’ll check out.
Thanks for the always good hints. 🙂
Great, Andrea.
I hope the new advice helps.
Andrew
Blog commenting is one of the good technique to get the faster visibility in search engines.Relevant links are main source of traffic.
Andrew – unbelievably another newbie blogger friend of mine and I were just talking about this subject today! You hear repeatedly how important it is, but it’s one of the great mysteries of blogging for me. Of course, until you explain it in that Andrew way. Yes, yes. I get it now. Off to find some links.
thx for this!
Kathy
Okay – question…went to Majestic SEO and I see that there are referring domains AND backlinks. Is one more important than the other?
I’ve been blogging for 2 years in June and only have 1,400 backlinks (clearly didn’t understand the importance). But I have 95 referring domains.
Am I right in assuming I can only directly affect the backlinks? Should I be working both numbers?
Help me Obi Wan, you’re my only hope.
Excellent question, Kathy and one I should have answered.
What the means is that you have 1400 bcklinks from 95 different domains.
Ideally you do want as many backlinks from as many different domains.
Andrew
Thanks for sharing this nice guide to get backlinks! I totally agree, the most effective way to get backlinks, is the commenting on dofollow blogs with commentluv plugin. But I think there is an other great feature, the blogs with they keywordluv plugin installed. This plugin places a deeplink next to your name, so you can get 2 backlinks with the same comment!
Julie
I wouldn’t say getting backlinks via commenting is THE most effective way…it’s one way.
Andrew
That’s interesting thanks. I didn’t know about the RSS directories.
Do you have any thoughts about whether there can be such a thing as too many backlinks appearing too fast? It’s something I’ve worried about.
Joy,
When you start out…yes…getting too many backlinks can cause problems.
You want to add the number of backlinks in a regular and consistent manner.
That way Google sees that you are adding backlinks in a natural way.
Andrew
The other advantage of blog commenting is that if you leave a good comment, you will be building up a social conection. Don’t just leave a spammy comment for the purpose of a backlink. If you put some effort into your commenting, you’ll also gain some readers to your site.
Totally agree, Richard.
I don’t know how many you get but I get a lot of ‘nice post…thanks’ type comments that I put straight into my spam folder!
Andrew
backlinks are essential for taking our blog to the next level and to make reputation of our blog….nice tips how to make 100s of backlinks everyday.
thanks for sharing it……..
Great tips Andrew, this is what I needed right now, specially the part featuring the tools you use to automate the backlinking process.
Just to show you how commentluv is really great and works, I got here through a comment you left on iBlogZone because of the title of this post after your comment. And now I’m going to check the other 8 posts in this series and subscribe by RSS 🙂
Jamie
I’m glad you found me!
Andrew
RSS directories work very well. When I first started out online I avoided them like the plague because it seemed too complicated to figure out. However, when my keywords weren’t ranking, I decided I needed to do something! I took the time to discover what they are and how to mash them up, so easy.
This post is best for beginners. It describes everything so understanding backlinks become very easy. Personally I like commentluv plugins.
Ayesha
So what do you suggest for advacned bloggers?
Andrew
Hi Andrew, this is a great post ever! I find some tips for my blog, especially about the links you gave. It’s very useful. I like building backlinks by using commentluv and social bookmark. I tried web directories before but never success.
The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you.
Jeriea
I think all my content is excellent! 🙂
Andrew
hello,
nice tips for beginners as well as pros. building backlinks is an essential part of overall SEO. and without backlinks you can not get good rankings. thanks for referring the URL’S of dofollow blogs.
For a couple of days I’ve been trying to get my head around the whole subject of backlinks, nofollow links, dofollow links, etc, and this article has really set me on the right track.
In one hour here at webuildyourblog, I’ve found at least a week’s worth of ‘things I have to understand and use’ on my own blog. So thanks for that.
I also want to thank you for introducing me to the wonderful Ana at trafficgenerationcafe via this post, who has some great articles on the advantages of sharing links via Commentluv.
Although I now have to spend a lot more time studying all this great content, it’s definitely worth it – we (my blog and me) really appreciate it and thank you for the great content.
Carolm
Thank YOU for those kind words – I realy appreciate it.
And yes,…Ana is lovely and she has a great blog! The cow! (only kidding).
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
I came through your site by chance and have found it quite useful. This series on how to build a blog is very informative and useful. I will surely bookmark them for my learning process. Those lists above for building backlinks are very useful. Thanks. 🙂
Vicky
Thanks – I appreciate you dropping by and pleased you like the blog series.
Andrew
Those are all great tips. One that I add is from my philosophy of customer service. Be ready at all times to interact with your audience “customer”. That means reply to comments, answer questions, be engaged with your readers.
Comments today are few, but when they come, we can’t ignore them. I’ll often follow up with questions myself which lead to new engaging blog posts.
Flavio
I underatdn exactly what you are saying. It’s about building those on-line relationships. Some can turn into customers.
Andrew
Hey Andrew!
These are great backlinking methods you have shared, my favorite backlinking strategy as always been blog commenting, and to automate this process, I recently started hiring people to backlink for me via blog commenting. 😀
Joseph
As long as they add a valuable comment rather than just ‘nice post’…otherwise your email account will be banned and comments will be added to the spam folders.
Andrew
According to my opinion, the content is the king but the backlinks are the army. So building quality, relevant and diverse backlinks to an EPIC content should go hand in hand! That post is the true example of how content should be presented! Thanks for sharing with us!