4 Great Tips for Creating Free Backlinks

One of the best ways to earn some Google reputation for your website or blog is by having a good number of inbound links to your blog. As I discussed in a previous article, backlinks are vital in raising the profile of your website as up to 75% of Google’s ranking factors are attributed to off page aspects. Google counts every inbound link as a vote for that particular website and an increase amount of trust is built up if Google recognises that these backlinks are of a good quality. Throughout this article I want to touch base on 4 great tips to help you generate some free backlinks for your blog or website.

Making Use of Forums: For advanced SEO purposes, forum posting is not good enough now-a-days. However, there are still other methods for using forums to create free backlinks; and to boot forums can be a great source of traffic as-well. I discussed forum traffic benefits in a previous article titled Generating Traffic & Sales from Forums. Getting back to creating free backlinks: first off, choose a good forum. How you might ask? A good forum has a high Google PR, allows the posting of links, and does not host any spam or illegal software. The forum should have useful posts which are actually discussed by other people – so a forum with a ton of new threads and no real replies probably isn’t the best choice. Focus on finding forums that are within your website’s or blog’s niche this way your links will provide relevant information to the forum community.

Now, once you have created an account, change your default signature with to feature a link back to your blog or website – along with a descriptive title tag. Also throw in some backlinked target keywords into your signature.  Make sure to post well written content in the forum daily. Don’t throw your links out there too much until a week or so in, once you have built up a decent reputation amongst the community.

Business Directory submission: Submit your links to relevant business directories, preferably those that automatically accept submissions. Most business directories will index your website or blog as soon as you submit it, however some places will take a few days to a week to process. Hershel.org is a great PR4 business directory which will index your link without moderation. Other good online directories are DirectoryWebLink, BlogTopSites, and Blog Nation. You can always search Google for more online business directories.

Alternate Social Media: Create a page for your blog on less known social media avenues, for example you can upload a presentation to www.slideshare.com, linking back to your blog in the description. I recently spoke more in-depth on alternate social media marketing in the following post: Alternative Social Media Marketing Techniques.

Blog Comments: Search Google for high PR blogs, preferably WordPress blogs as they come with a decent SEO optimization right out of the box. Find a post or an article that discusses something relevant to your own website or blog. This can either ask a question you might have the answer to, or simply discuss a similar topic. Make an informative and relevant post, and refrain from linking back to your website or blog within your blog post. Now in the Name field, enter one of your websites target keyword. Put your email and website link in the respective fields. When your comment is published, your target keyword will be linked to your blog.

If your comment directly mentions a post you have made that answers, or argues the post you are commenting on – a mention or a link in the post comment area is just fine.

If you have any other backlink tips and techniques that you feel should be mentioned here – feel free to post them in the comments below (and give yourself a free backlink!)