How to Get Backlinks – Drive that Traffic in the Right Direction

Posted by Aerion Miles on October 22, 2009 under Search Engine Optimization, Website Traffic | Read the First Comment

A backlink is an incredibly helpful way to drive traffic to your website.  It’s important too, if your website’s survival and success depends on having a lot of traffic and to have as many eyeballs as possible scanning your website.  With a new site it can be frustrating trying to figure out how to drive traffic to your site.  Getting backlinks is a powerful way to drive that traffic to your website.

So, with this in mind, we’ll review here how to get backlinks.  One of the most common ways people get backlinks is to submit links to your website on as many directories as humanly possible.  There are so many of these directories that it will be helpful to do this.  It may take some time, but it will be worth it.  Before you submit your link to a directory you want to do a little research to be sure first that it does indeed pass on link juice (which we will discuss at a later time) and second that it is a high value directory and will continue to pass on the link juice long ways down the road.  You also want to make sure that the directory you are submitting your link to is relevant with the site you are promoting.  Some good directories to take a look at are:

• DMOZ
• Starting Point
• Business.com
• Canny Link
• Best of The Web
• Librarians’ Internet Index
• America’s Best

Link exchanges, or reciprocal linking, are additional methods used by many webmasters and website owners to get backlinks.  If you’re looking to find out how to get backlinks, this is a helpful way; however, it’s important to link only to related sites and to not mass email website owners for reciprocity.  That is a surefire way to be ignored.  Another, possibly more fun, way to get backlinks is to write something highly controversial or exciting that everyone links to, just to share and discuss!  This is called link baiting. Then the readers will link to it over and over again to discuss, and this creates that fire and thus, your backlinks.

Here are some more ways as to how to get backlinks.  This one is good: provide quality content.  Nothing gets backlinks as much as something extremely helpful.  If someone knows that your website has some great information, they are likely to share it with others.  You can also post on a forum.  However, make sure you are not spamming.  Maybe include your link in your signature or something, but don’t spam and leave.  The proper thing to do is to join a forum and contribute value to that forum which will make the reader want to click onto your site to see what else you have to offer.  RSS feeds are another great way to get your backlinks running.  Also, article writing is a great way to have yet more backlinks.  You are usually allowed to put two links either in the article or in the author resource box that will help drive traffic to your site. 

Learning how to get backlinks is an essential ingredient in the success of many websites.  One of these final ways is to provide a “link to me” section which includes the code for someone’s website.  A good wordpress plugin for this is Link To Me.  This is a way to get people to include it in their website which makes your job easier.  These are all effective ways to get your backlinks up and running.  Once you get your backlinks up it’s only a matter of time before that traffic starts rolling in.