While many people frown on buying backlinks from sellers on sites like SEOClerks or Fiverr, if used only as part of your overall backlink building strategy, paid links can boost your search engine results.
However, the best links, and the ones that Google would prefer a site to have, are the naturally occurring links, because they are an indication of the popularity and reliability of a website. In an ideal world, you’d link to a website simply because of its high-quality content, but in reality, website owners need to be a bit more proactive about generating those links themselves.
If you have a website or blog and you want it to rank high on Google and other search engines, here are some of the ways you can generate more backlinks to your site.
article directories
Article directories are a good way to get permanent backlinks to your site and can also generate traffic. On the highest quality article sites like EzineArticles, you can place two backlinks per article. However, the articles published on these sites must be written correctly and cannot be too self-promotional.
blog commenting
Posting comments on other people’s blogs is another easy option. Most blogs allow comments and in most of them you can add a URL, either to the comment itself or to your user profile. However, you will need to make your comments meaningful and helpful, or they will simply be deleted as spam.
Participating in forums
By joining forums related to the niche of your website or blog, you will be able to leave comments on existing threads or start your own threads. You can usually add your website address to your forum profile, possibly include it in your profile signature, and sometimes use it in your comments. However, as with blog comments, you cannot spam a forum, or the moderators will remove your comments and possibly prevent you from accessing the site.
Guest blog posts
Guest posting on other people’s blogs will get you more niche-specific links to your site. If you can offer useful and informative content that is of interest to a blog’s readers, the blog owner can publish a guest post for you that includes a link to your site.
Encourage sharing of your content
Make sharing your content easy by adding share buttons on every post. If the platform you’ve used to develop your site doesn’t already have share buttons available, there are many free services that will provide you with a share button widget that you can add to your site. You can easily encourage more people to share your content by asking. Just leave a friendly reminder to share at the bottom of each post.
social bookmarking
Adding your URLs to social bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon and Reddit, will earn you valuable backlinks and traffic. To avoid being accused of spamming, you will need to be seen to properly participate on the site, which will mean liking other people’s bookmarks and adding bookmarks from sites other than your own.
These are just some of the ways that you can generate backlinks for your website and they are things that you can do on a regular basis. The best strategy is to dedicate an hour a day to SEO tasks and create more links. Unfortunately, it is an ongoing process that will take some time, but will eventually improve your rankings on Google and other search engines.