Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
We all know how annoying link building can be. Whether you’re running a blog or a general website, you absolutely must build links. Wouldn’t it be easier if content really was king? I used to think that back when I started this blog. I thought if I just posted solid content I’d get high rankings and lots of traffic. Unfortunately, my plan was flawed and I ended up spending twice as much time link building than I did writing content. So I thought I’d put together a short list of link building tips that should help you gain more backlinks & ultimately traffic.
In this guide
1. Build Links In Your Every Day Activity
You know… from the stuff you’re already doing online you could build a ton of extra links. I don’t know about you but, I religiously read around 10 blogs. 10 Internet Marketing related blogs that I thoroughly enjoy and learn a lot from. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first blog you’ve come across. Anyway, there are two main links you can build from your every day activity. Comment and forum links.
When you’re reading blog posts, scroll down and take the time to write a comment. For like 60 seconds of input you can have a decent backlink. Plus, comment links consistently send me between 50 and 100 visitors a day. I know it’s not much, but for the 30-60 seconds it takes to leave a comment, it’s totally worth it. For traffic and backlinks.
Then there’s forums, I’m sure you know all about them. I personally don’t spend a lot of time on forums as they are a huge distraction and they’re full of crap most of the time. With that being said, forums are cool and people love spending time on them. So if you tend to visit forums a lot, add your anchor text in your forum signature. Doing that will allow you to effortlessly gain a few links whenever you’re spending time on forums. I’m sure there’s more links you can build in your every day Internet life, but those are the 2 fastest and easiest links to build.
2. Link Variety
You know how important it is to have a wide variety of backlinks? Different kinds coming from different sources… HIGHLY important. I know this one’s totally common sense but, hardly anyone takes advantage of all the available link sources out there. Most of the time, people use content to build links as contextual backlinks rock.
So make use of every piece of content you have. A lot of the guys I know who actually run successful blogs, they only submit their stuff to article directories. While article directory links work very well, they’ve lost a lot of their effectiveness over the past few years. Like 4 years ago you could easily rely on article directory links to gain top rankings. Now… not so much.
So submit your content everywhere. Instead of just submitting to article directories, submit to web2.0 sites, submit to press release sites and submit to blogs. Anyway, here is a list of the different kind of links you SHOULD build:
- Web2.0 Profiles
- Forum Profiles
- Web2.0/Social Network
- Social Bookmarks
- RSS
- Press Releases
- Video
- Article Directory
- Blog Networks
- Blog Comments
Build all of those links and your rankings will explode!
3. Anchor Text Variety
This is something hardly anyone actually knows. If you don’t use a variety of anchor text, you can run into some problems. Bad rankings and worst case scenario… you can get sandboxed. Yeah, I’ve seen it happen twice before and I’m sure it’s happened to thousands of people. If you don’t use a variety of anchor text you can get banished from the search engines… temporarily.
This will only happen in extreme cases when you build like 50,000 links using one anchor text variation. A buddy of mine who runs a health site built 90% of his links using the same anchor text and… he built like 150,000 links in 3 months. A tad black hat and his site got manually reviewed. The problem was the anchor text, so use around 75% anchor text of the keyword you want to rank for. 25% close variations. It’s also a good idea to use anchor text like “click here”, “here”, “link” & “website”.
4. Make deals!
This is another obscure tip that I don’t use enough. Mainly, make deals with other authority sites/blogs in your niche. Blogroll & guest blogging deals. Guest blogging rocks and has a million and 1 benefits. For most, they provide instantaneous traffic. They’re also amazing for list building and gaining blog subscribers. Plus, they provide great backlinks. So make a deal where you post on someone’s blog x times a month and in exchange, they do exactly the same.
Then there’s using a blogroll. Blogroll’s are an easy way of gaining a crap load of backlinks for doing no work whatsoever. They’re basically a way of you and your buddies scratching each other’s backs. You place a widget in your sidebars linking to each other’s sites.
You don’t want to go too crazy with blogroll’s as you’ll end up giving away too much link juice. I’d say link to 5-10 other sites max. Some marketers say reciprocal links suck when I know for a fact that blogroll’s can give an instant boost in rankings, traffic & site authority. Just be careful who you make these deals with.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
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Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Rick Pua Pila, September 2, 2011, 10:22
Outreach to bloggers. Much of the time, bloggers are looking for topics to write about. If you can find bloggers who write about the topics you are looking to get links on, there may be some business synergy for you to explore. (spam link removed)
Rick Pua Pila, September 2, 2011, 10:30
A recent article from SEOmoz discussed two interesting strategies for link building. The first incorporated software called Screaming Frog. According to SEOmoz, Screaming Frog helps detect 404 pages within websites. If you are looking for inbound links, this tool can be used in two different ways. (spam link removed)
John Pate, September 2, 2011, 11:15
This is some really great ideas that are often looked over for the flashy approach everyone is looking for nowadays. Thank you for showing us how to (spam link removed) and with this teaching, many others will learn how to keep all the profits for themselves too 🙂 you’re awesome bro…
lazyassgamer, September 2, 2011, 11:22
Great tips, I had not thought of backlink variety.
erickalberer, September 2, 2011, 11:30
Great tips Dave! Simple but effective. I look at link build like tributaries to a river, they start off small but after a while it all adds up.
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Which of these four actually still works in 2024, given the piece flags its own tools as discontinued twice?
Ivy, my read: the everyday-activity link building, comments and forum signatures, is the one still standing, mainly because it was never really about search rank — it drove direct clicks regardless of what Google did with the link value. The anchor text and “build every kind of link” advice assumes a link-graph model of ranking that’s been substantially rewritten since this was written.
Ivy, twenty-two years in corporate taught me that “build a relationship with someone who’ll swap a favor” outlives every tactic and every algorithm update, corporate or otherwise. The blogroll and guest-post section is just office politics with a domain name attached, and it’s the one piece of this I’d bet on still working in another decade, long after the rest of this list is a museum piece.
Graham, the “build relationships slowly” version is more my speed than the article’s other three points, if I’m honest — those all sound like things I’d research for months and never actually execute. Trading guest posts with someone I already half-know feels achievable. Cold pitching a stranger for a blogroll swap does not.
The anchor text variety point is really a risk management exercise disguised as an SEO tip — deliberately introducing imperfection so the pattern doesn’t look manufactured. I use a version of this with clients on personal branding too: vary the language you use to describe yourself so it reads like a person, not a template. What would the equivalent “don’t over-optimize” rule look like in how you talk about your own business?
To pull the actual steps out of this: 1) use links you’re already generating anyway, from comments and forum signatures, 2) diversify the type of link, not just the source, 3) keep anchor text mixed so it doesn’t look automated, 4) trade guest posts and blogroll spots with people in the niche. The gap: no mention of how to tell a genuinely useful blogroll swap from two sites propping each other up for no reason beyond mutual backscratching.
50 to 100 visitors a day from comment links — over what sample size? Without a base rate that’s a vibe, not a number.
Yuki, fair question — I’d want the same before trusting that number. What I did instead of trusting the post’s figure: tracked referral traffic per comment link for a month in a spreadsheet. Answer for my own site was closer to 2-3 visits per comment, not enough to bother automating blog commenting the way some tools out there try to.
What’s being described in the anchor text section, without the term ever being used, is essentially over-optimization detection — search engines penalizing link profiles that look too clean or too uniform to be organic, which is reasonably well documented in the SEO literature even though posts like this one rarely cite it by name. Where I’d push back is the specific threshold implied here, the idea that there’s a known number of links or a known percentage split that triggers a manual review. Nobody outside the search engine actually has that number. What gets passed around in posts like this is folklore built from a handful of anecdotes, presented with far more precision than the underlying evidence supports, and that gap between confidence and evidence is worth noticing every time a specific percentage appears without a source.