Web Quirk

One of the biggest parts of SEO is building links to your website which will help search engines determine what content is on your website. Furthermore the more links that exist to your website the more traffic – in theory – you should get. Building link back can take time and money but in this blog post we’ll explore 5 free and simple ways to build links to your website for both SEO and traffic.

Directories

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of directories focused around almost every subject you can think about so you’ll always find one relevant to your website. Directories won’t always bring you massive amounts of traffic but they will provide you with a backlink to your site, generally all for free too. It should be noted however that while submission to a few relevant directories is a good thing, submitting to every one under the sun – especially those not relevant to your site’s topic – might do more harm than good.

There are two directories (both free) which you should definitely submit your website to – these are DMOZ and Yahoo. Unfortunately, getting into these directories can be hard and can quite literally take years due to the queues and a lack of editors but do make sure you submit your site anyway!

Blogs comments

Most blogs allow you to provide a website URL when making a comment – this is another easy backlink for your website. A lot of blogs however have the “nofollow” rel attribute added – which means search engines will just ignore it, so for SEO purposes it’s rather useless. There are an ever growing amount of so called “dofollow” blogs and a number of specialist search engines and resources have been created to help you find them.

Forums

When signing up to forums there is also typically a website URL field which can be filled out. Furthermore and perhaps more importantly there is the signature space which can be used to advertise your websites and gain more backlinks. Some forums will be more popular than others and some may require you to meet certain conditions before being able to add a signature, for example collecting 10 posts or being registered for 2 days.

As with blogs some forums may add a “nofollow” rel attribute removing any SEO benefit from your links, however even if this is the case – if the forum is popular and you post around – you should get quite a bit of traffic.

One thing you must make sure you do is respect the forum’s rules, if they don’t allow you to advertise your site then don’t. Spamming and breaking the rules will only lead you and your site to gain a bad reputation and maybe even blacklisted from other forums.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking websites and apps allow users to bookmark and share a URL with either friends or the whole world by making it public and this means an extra back link and hence more traffic for your site. Often very popular links can easily provide tens of thousands of unique users over just a few days.

Again, most of the more popular social bookmarking sites use the nofollow rel attribute and so these types of back links are mainly for traffic – there are, however a number of dofollow social bookmarking sites, see 15+ dofollow social bookmarking sites

There’s nothing stopping you from signing up and bookmarking your own links – just don’t spam – not every one of your blog posts are going to be worth being bookmarked. You can however prompt your own visitors to bookmark pages on your site that they may find interesting, entertaining or informative. Services such as AddThis allow you to very easily insert a ‘Bookmark/Share with’ box on any page of your site. This enables users to add pages of your website to such services with a couple of clicks.

Contributing to websites

We’ve already seen how contributing to both forums and blogs can help you increase your site’s exposure on the web and to search crawlers – well there are heck of a lot more sites around which allow you to add a backlink when you contribute.

Yahoo Answers allows you to add links to sources as you answer questions, be helpful and use your own knowledge and information on your website to answer people’s question in a polite and honest manner, adding a link to your website as the source.

You can create a page on one of many “human edited search engines” such as Mahalo or Squidoo about the niche of your website. Provide information to others and traffic for your site and earn a few dollars from the ad revenue sharing programs while your at it!

You can help create, edit and improve articles about your niche on online encyclopaedias such as WikiPedia and Answers.com. Cite your website as a source (assuming it is, of course) or add it as an external link if it fits in with the article.

That’s your lot!

Hopefully these tips will allow you to increase backlinks to your site and in turn your website’s traffic and search engine rankings. One last tip – make sure to always stick to the rules when adding your own links to other’s sites, you don’t want your domain to be blacklisted so don’t spam!