Simple Guide to Getting Backlinks

Backlinks to your site are important. Google’s search algorithm takes into account how many other sites are linking to your site. Your site will rank higher if more sites are linking to you. (There are lots more variables to take into account, but this is the general idea).

However, it’s not really that simple. The Google search algorithm is constantly tweaked and if you just created thousands of backlinks overnight, then Google knows you are trying to game the system and your site will probably be removed from its search engine results.

So instead of getting the high ranking that you think you will get, you might not get any ranking at all!

Create Outbound Links!

But here’s a tip. What you need to do is create outbound links. This means that you link out to other sites. This is counter-intuitive to the usual strategies that you will hear… which is why it works. While everyone else is busy building vast numbers of backlinks to their site in hopes it getting their site to rank higher, you can start creating outbound links to other sites.

The easiest way is to start with about four outbound links – not affiliate links. These are are just plain links. Link to a really good authority site about your subject that is ranked very high for a general keyword. Or a site like Wikipedia, or a government site or a YouTube video.

Putting those links on your WordPress site is easy. Login to your WordPress Admin panel and expand the “Links” menu item on the left. This reveals a few options so you can easily add some new links. Then go to the “Appearance->Widgets” Admin page and simply drag and drop the Links widget to your sidebar.  Real easy.

Or just write some short blog posts that contain those plain outbound links. You can decide the best way that you want to do this. Notice that I am sprinkling a few of those plain links in this post?

Creating Backlinks

Now let’s discuss how to get backlinks to your site. There are many tactics and not all of them work all the time, but all of them do work some of the time. It’s best that you experiment with different tactics until you find results that work well for you.

Create Videos

You should create at least one YouTube video. You can create a screencast video for free (5 min limit) by using Jing. Or some professional alternatives are Camtasia (Windows) or ScreenFlow (Mac). Both have trial / demo versions so you can still use those for free. Just shoot a video where you talk about your blog.

Then post the video on YouTube. In the description, make sure to put in the full URL to your site starting with “http://”. You know you added the link correctly if the link is clickable. Also put your keywords in the description and the title.

Since YouTube is owned by Google, YouTube videos show up in the Google search results. For example, a search in Google for “banana” reveals:

Example: Here’s a recent

 I did for the WP Lightbox Ultimate Plugin. I just wanted to show you it’s not difficult to produce your own screencasts using good tools. For this screencast I used ScreenFlow and the video is hosted on Vimeo since I do not want Ads to be shown on our product demonstration (as is the case with YouTube).

Add Breadcrumb Navigation

You should also add breadcrumb navigation to your WordPress theme. A breadcrumb plugin will automaticaly create links from one of your pages to another page etc and shows the user where they are in your category hierarchy. That’s great, because those internal links count the same as links from other sites, in terms of quantity. So you are controlling the creation of those backlinks automatically.

Create Informational Pages

Another simple place to get a backlink is to is create a lens at Squidoo. Don’t make it spammy. Just make it simple, straight forward and informational and only include one link to your site. You also want to link out from your lens to regular authority sites with no commercial intent, so you look less like a marketer and more like someone who is just creating an informational site.

You can also do the same thing with HubPages

Outsource for Cheap

A great site to experiment with is Fiverr. This is a site where you pay people $5 to do simple tasks. Go there and do a search for “backlinks”.

For example someone posting on Fiverr says they can create five .edu backlinks for your site for $5. That’s a good deal and worth experimenting with since .edu sites are generally worth more because they are higher quality links.

While you are at Fiverr, explore what you could use other people to do for you. For example you could get someone to setup a WordPress blog for you, or do some keyword research, or some Twitter promotion etc. There are a lot of possibilities there, so it’s worth checking out.

Other places to get backlinks are social bookmarking sites. OnlyWire is a good resource for this and they also have free options. Another tactic is to outsource through Fiverr, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Freelancer or oDesk etc.

The outsourcers will find relevant blogs that allow comments with links in them, and your outsourcer will post a quality response with a link back to your site.

Summary

Don’t be too greedy with just trying to secure backlinks to your site. You need to make your site look natural to Google, (and not look like a backlinking black hole) so make sure to include some outbound links to authority sites about your subject that are ranked very high for a general keyword.

Exercise

Time to take action.

• If you have been only concentrating on creating backlinks, now is the time to also consider creating some plain outbound links.
• Also explore Fiverr… for $5, it’s worth the experiment.
• Creating screencasts is also worthwhile and a good skill to have. Try the free options and make a test screencast about something simple.

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