How do you get people to buy your product if you don’t tell them about it? How do you get a search engine to rank your site if other sites don’t link it? This is exactly the reason why backlinking is important. Backlinks are a way to tell search engines that a) your site is worthy of visiting, and b) other sites care enough about your site that they even link to you. The methods to backlinking are relatively straight forward, so here they are:

• Directory Submissions – Submitting to directories is a great way to build up backlinks as well as PageRank. Look for directories that have pagerank and preferably get visited often. It is doubtful you’ll receive much traffic from these, but search engines will love you for submitting. Also, be sure to submit to dmoz.org as this directory is human edited and works with many popular search engines as I described in this post.



• Blog Commenting – Comment on the blogs you visit and read and include a backlink url in your comment. High pagerank blogs may also be good to post comments on, but don’t just visit random blogs and post comments just for the sake of it. Also include thoughtful comments because other readers will see your comments and if they’re good, they’ll want to know more about you.
• Social Networking – Don’t underestimate the power of Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, Odnoklassniki, etc. Add your link to your (or your blog’s) profile page and connect with others. Sure, it might not be very full, but SEO doesn’t happen overnight. This is a long and grueling process that you must make the best of.
• Forums – Forums are also a great way to add some variation to your backlinks. They may not be very “SEO-savvy” but they’ll help you nonetheless whether they’ll bring in traffic or plain backlinks. What’s even better if your link is found on forum pages that are related to your topic.
• Link exchanges – Link exchanges are great too as long as you trade with sites that display your real URL instead of http://domain.com/out.php?id=2345. Always be sure you watch out for that otherwise your link exchanges are pointless for SEO.
• Paid/Unpaid Reviews – By now we’re out of freebie ways of backlinking, so if you’re willing to forge out a couple bucks to pay someone to review your blog, do that. Not only will you get more traffic, but your reviewer will boost your rankings heavily with the keywords you want them to include. Unpaid reviews work if you have a buddy and wish to trade reviews or something along those lines.
• Advertising – Plain ol’ advertising works as well to have your link placed on various sites. When it comes to money though, be sure to choose sites that will guarantee good backlinks because when it comes to money, everyone has a shortage of it.

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