How to gain more backlinks for your website

Gaining more backlinks to your website will increase its position in search engine results. We explain how to get more links.

Why get more links?

If you rely on search engines to generate visitors to your website, then backlinks are very important. Search engines consider many factors when determining which websites should appear at the top of search results. The quality of the website and the topic of the website are important. But generally, the most important factor is the number of links pointing to the website, from other websites, and the quality of those links. These links are known as backlinks. If you rely on search engines for visitor traffic to your website, gaining more backlinks will increase your search engine traffic.

How to get more links

There are various methods in gaining links to your website. You should only consider using honest techniques. There are some techniques that are not so honest, such as spamming blogs and websites with spam entries, containing backlinks to your website. Whilst using these techniques can be effective in the short term, they will not be effective in the long term. You also run the risk of being penalised by search engines.

Web directories

Web directories have been one of the oldest, and most widely used, techniques to gaining backlinks. It is easy to submit to web directories, and you can expect fairly good results. The value of these links are low, but it is relatively easy to gain large amounts of them. They are a great place to get started when starting a link building campaign. Read more..

Article directories

Articles directories are a fairly new idea in the world of the internet. Links from article directories are of good value, generally better than web directories. However, it takes more time and effort to get these links. Read more...

Reciprocal links

A few year ago reciprocal linking was one of the best ways of gaining backlinks. It required relatively little effort, and one could gain large numbers of links quickly. Search engines are constantly evolving their knowledge and algorithms. Today (January 2007) reciprocal links have much less value than before. However, Google suggests that reciprocal links from websites with similar topics still carry good value. Read more...

Forums signatures

Forum signatures are an easy way to gain backlinks, and actual visitors, from topic related website forums. It's easy to add your backlinks to a forum signature, and post forum topics and replies to a website. Forum signatures links carry little value, but the more related the website or forum, the better value of the link. Read more...

Cross-linking your websites

If you own or manage multiple websites, you can add backlinks from one website to another. In previous years it was common practice to add backlinks to all of your websites on the footer or homepage of each of your other websites. Today, search engines such as Google frown upon this, and may even penalise this approach. If you have websites that are topic related, then cross-link them - ideally from the home page. Read more...

Blogs

Blogs are a good way to easily get backlinks to your websites. However, for a blog to be considered valuable, and hence any backlinks from it to be valuable, the blog must have many backlinks itself. This isn't easy to do. Most webmasters will only link to a high quality blog. Its a good idea to keep one blog, and to add to it one backlink to each of your websites.

Friends or associates websites

Ask your friends or associates to add backlinks to your website, from theirs. Concentrate on topic related websites.

'Link to us' features on your website

Add a 'link to us' or 'link to this page' feature to your web pages. If you make it easy, other webmasters and bloggers will use the feature and you will slowly build more backlinks.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO is the best long term method of gaining backlinks. However, this is not something you can encourage or be pro-active in. Except in ensuring your website offers quality content, and then people will naturally link to your website. Read more...

Don't use

There are some techniques used in gaining backlinks that are a bad idea. The following have been used heavily in the past, and are even still used. The search engines know all of the tricks. Don't cheat, it is a waste of time and effort, and you will eventually be penalised.

Link exchange programs

Previously, link exchange programs where a quick way of gaining backlinks. This generally meant gaining backlinks from non-topic related websites. This is not recommended anymore. More importantly though, is that the major search engines have established who the link exchange programs, and those websites that take part in them. They then penalise those associated with them. Don't do it.

Spam

Many people are spamming websites, forums, guest books and more commonly blogs, to gain large numbers of backlinks. This is an unethical method. Don't do it. Search engines will identify this approach and penalise.