Google’s search engine algorithm puts a lot of weight on how many people link to your website. It’s a bit like having lots of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter.
In crude terms, the more people linking to your website the more “popular” and authoritative your site must be.
Of course, there’s a catch. Much like the creatures in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, all links are created equal but some are more equal than others. All other things being equal (a great cop-out phrase!), a link from a site such as the BBC will carry more weight than a link from your picture album about your grandchildren.
Here are 5 ways to get more links to your website (ethically, of course):
Videos
YouTube is one of the most used sites on the internet. Creating a video and putting it on YouTube allows you to also put a link to your website in the description. So the next time Google indexes YouTube – which happens on a very regular basis – it is likely to find your link and count that as a positive vote for your site’s popularity.
If your video is popular, you’re also likely to get some people clicking across to your website and there’s also a chance that it will appear in the main Google search results.
Articles
These have been around thousands of years – as long as there has been the written word – so it’s no surprise that the internet has a large quantity of published articles. With the advent of easy publishing methods such as the internet, anyone can become a published author.
You’ve probably come across articles from sites such as EzineArticles when you’ve been searching the web. This features thousands of authors and, with a little time and effort, you can join their ranks. Getting your article published on this kind of site allows you to have a brief advert (technically called a resource box) for yourself or your website at the end. Which means another link to your website.
Article sites have the added benefit that the articles are available for syndication across the web. The only stipulation is that your resource box stays with the article and that your links are clickable as well. It’s a great way of building up your inbound links.
Article writing is the backbone of many campaigns to increase inbound links for one very good reason: it works.
Profile Links
Chances are that you have a profile on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Most of these profiles have a space for you to add your own website link. Take a few minutes to go through the various sites you’re a member of and update your profile so that it includes a link to your website.
Press Releases
A few years ago, press releases really were released to journalists in the hope of getting your story in the news. Whilst this still happens to an extent. A lot press releases nowadays are written as barely disguised advertisements – you can spot one of more of them most days in your newspaper. Maybe they’re a survey, maybe they’re how many brussels sprouts Waitrose sold in the run up to Christmas but essentially a lot of them are a space filler for time pressed journalists.
The good news is that the internet allows you to produce and post your own press releases.
The even better news is that these don’t have to ever get printed in a newspaper or magazine or even make it to Google News (although there’s a good chance that last option could happen). They count as another inbound link from a trusted site. Producing regular press releases is a habit worth getting into.
Blog comments
This technique is often misused. Most of the posts on this site have comments disabled, mainly because even with the anti-spam options there are still way too many people posting spammy comments – looking at the recent stats on one of my blogs, 20,649 spam comments have been eliminated to date, most of them by the comment spam protection systems I use.
So you should use blog comments sparingly and only when you have something worthwhile to add to the post. Done correctly, with meaningful comments related to the post concerned, blog comments are a good way to get backlinks to your website.
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