The Basics of Inbound Link Building

Inbound links are one of the most controversial topics in SEO. There is no doubt that having a ton of sites linking to yours used to juice up your site into great rankings several years ago. But is that really true anymore? They search engines have gotten a lot smarter and savvier about what site should ranking well or out-rank others in the same niche. The search engines do look at how many sites are linking to yours, the quality of the sites linking to you, and consider them votes for your site. Logically, if you have a lot of sites with clout themselves linking to you there must be a reason for it and therefore will reflect well on your site. But it’s only one factor in the overall algorithm which determines how well your site rankings overall and how many of your inner pages rank well. There are activities you can do to increase your inbound links. Here are some ideas for increasing your inbound links without paying for anything:

Blog Commenting is one of the best ways to increase your inbound links. You have to do it well though – by leaving good comments, or your comments simply won’t be published to the site and therefore you won’t gain an inbound link. Some blogs are considered Do Follow and some No Follow which means the search engine spiders follow the links to your site from the blog. When blog commenting in general, I never worry about whether the blog is Do Follow or not because a blog comment can bring a click through to your site any ways. Google blog search is probably the best way to find niche blogs to comment on. Following people on Twitter that post article urls in a particular industry is also a great way to have content pushed to you that can be visited and commented on. Google Alerts are another great way to get new blog posts and articles pushed to you that can be commented on with a link back to your site or social profiles.

Forum Signatures can be an excellent source of inbound links, as well as relevant traffic to your site. Let’s say you are promoting a product about fitness, and you have established a niche site with high quality, unique fitness advice. If you make relevant, helpful, and informative posts on fitness forums, you will build up a reputation as an authority figure on the topic. You will want to place a link to your resource niche site in the signature of your forum profile. When you do this, every time you make a post, your link is included. This is excellent for building reputation with search engines, as well as driving very targeted traffic to your website. It definitely has to be done in volume and with a concerted effort over time, if you want to get sustained traffic from this method.

Social Bookmarking is another fantastic way to build very powerful links to your niche site. As long as you are providing quality, unique information you can submit your sites to social bookmarking hubs like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Tumblr. This builds links from the social bookmarking sites to your site. In addition, it will be listed on the directory for others to find. Another nice feature is social bookmarking is that you can achieve multiple organic rankings for the same article post in the search engine, which increase the likelihood your content will be seen and possibly shared further. You should always share your articles and posts in your Facebook profile and Fan Page as well, which could get it shared further which increases your overall syndication per article.

There are many ways to build inbound links to your site and it will work to varying degrees depending on how much you are able to do it. Stay away from buying links, it’s an outdated practice and can hurt your site’s rankings. Rather, you can pump up your site with a ton of unique articles and keep up the posting effort to achieve the kind of rankings you want. Thanks for reading and let me know what you think!