If you're a small business or consultancy, building backlinks to your website can be an effective way to gain relevant traffic and grow your business—no matter what your industry.
Here are five ways to kick off your link-building with ease.
1. Guest-Blogging
Guest-blogging is an incredible method for building backlinks. You can go about it in several ways...
Search for guest-blogging opportunities using queries such as "write for us," "submit post," and "become a contributor." Those queries are the most basic and yield the best results, though you can try others.
You can also turn to networks that connect those looking for guest-blogging opportunities with blogs that need new content. The largest of those networks is MyBlogGuest.com. It allows you to upload your article for others to use, contact bloggers who are seeking new contributors, and chat and connect with others in the guest-blogging community.
You can also search for relevant blogs within your niche and pitch your guest blog post to them. Getting your article posted this way is more difficult, but if your content fits with the blog's theme and it's well written, you have a decent chance. Links from such sources tend to be of the highest authority and can really help your link profile.
2. PR Networks
Several free subscription services online bring together reporters, bloggers, and authors looking for answers to specific questions. Using sites such as HARO, Reporter Connection, PitchRate, and the paid service ProfNet is a simple way to earn links to your website.
The sites basically work like this: Reporters ask questions about specific topics; you respond if the questions pertain to your area of knowledge; the reporter credits you as a source usually via a backlink. Simple!
You can also try your luck on FlackList, a public relations social media site. I would liken it to Facebook for public relations.
HARO sends three daily emails, each containing 30-70 queries. Receiving hundreds of queries a day, five days a week, you will surely find a blog to contribute to sooner rather than later. Via HARO, I have earned dozens of backlinks and have been featured on the websites of FOX News and The Huffington Post, to name a couple.
Reporter Connection and PitchRate usually send one email per day. The networks are smaller with fewer queries, but equally important to your backlink-building strategy. Both are free services.
3. Reviews and Giveaways
If you run an e-commerce site, product reviews can be one of the simplest and most effective ways of building backlinks. Thousands of bloggers are looking for various products to review and give away. And once your product is featured on one giveaway site, you will likely receive emails from others asking for the opportunity to do the same on their blogs.
Search for those bloggers on Google using variations of the query "product reviews." The difficult part is deciding which bloggers are worth your time and effort.
Giveaways work the same way, although when done properly they will also get you mentions on social media sites. You can also gain links by posting the giveaway details on your own site and promoting the giveaway on sites like tipjunkie.com.
4. Blog Commenting
When done right, blog commenting can be an effective way to build links. The key is to comment only on very relevant blogs and posts. Despite "no follow" tags, such comments can help you rank, in part by sending others to your site—and if they like what they see, they'll link to you. But make sure to keep your comments interesting and useful.
You can also search for or follow blogs that are not moderated. Those will generally be much less relevant and will require much less effort. The problem is you get what you pay for: Little time and effort result in little authority. Commenting on such blogs is likely a waste of time. Not enough is known about how Google examines a link profile for me to recommend doing it. But if you have a strong link profile, you can throw a couple comments out there without fear of hurting yourself.
5. Submissions to Niche Sites
Is your site unique and visually attractive? Submit it to one of the various CSS galleries. Is your business idea off the wall, but useful? Submit it to Springwise.com.
A multitude of niche sites are just waiting to feature your brand and link back to you. All it takes is a little ingenuity and good research skills. Those sites will pass you gallons of link juice and send you traffic, providing even more opportunities for links.
Wait, There's More...
Of course, you can earn quick and easy backlinks via other methods, too, such as...
- Ezines
- Squidoo, Hub pages, etc.
- Directories
- Forums
- Bookmarking sites
- Blogging (effective, but the links are not heavily weighted until the blog is established)
- Press releases
- Email outreach
- Video and image submissions
Link building need not be difficult. Learn what you can by reading up on the subject, gain experience by actually trying what you read, and write articles like this to help others (and gain backlinks yourself).
