Backlinks help online businesses. They send people and they send search engines to you. Not all backlinks are equal and having some backlink diversity is important. Read on to learn more.
Why Are Backlinks Important
Links pointing to your website equate to getting a popularity vote. These links can be valuable in terms of elevating the importance and relevance of your site in the eye’s of search engines – who send you free organic traffic.
Having sites point to your site is a good idea. Having relevant sites with good reputations pointing to your website is even better.
Backlink Diversity Tips
Some think that submitting 1000 articles to an article directory is a good linking strategy. And it could be – provided that this isn’t all that you do for your website. Sure, those links will improve your popularity and if they’re planted in high quality articles with a diversified keyword strategy, they’ll bring you traffic directly and indirectly through search engine rankings.
Search engines might not pay as much attention if your link strategy appears to be too intentional and narrow. Having backlink diversity looks more natural. Here are some tips:
• Don’t just link to the home page. Link to deep pages as well.
• Does the keyword anchor text link you’re using exist on the page you’re linking to? If the page you’re linking to is optimised for the same phrase that’s even better!
• Link from various social sites to multiple posts and do some networking so that other people to link to you as well (more users linking to the same post is better than the same person always linking).
• Link from related niche forums both in the message and in the signature.
• 
Link from blog comments.
• Link from web 2.0 pages.
• Ask for blogroll links from peers.
• Blog directory links can be good.
All your links can’t be built in a day. Link building, like relationship marketing, takes time, strategy, perseverance, and a diversified set of actions. On a regular basis, look at your website reports to see where your links are coming from and look at where you may be able to improve your backlink diversity.
If you work on building a great online reputation and providing value, you will get links you didn’t expect from sites that can help you build your reputation and improve your pagerank as well.
About Sean Rasmussen
The Rising Search for the key phrase, “twitter affiliate marketing” is now at over 500% and has been for well over 2 weeks. There is no person I know who wouldn’t benefit from placing a few good Twitter Tools on their home page.
I wish I knew enough about this to know how placing a few Twitter Tools on my home page gives me backlink diversity, Paul. I wonder which Twitter Tools you mean?
Oh wow, what an interesting post!
I never thought about backlink diversity before… I like some of these easy backlink diversity strategies. I’ll have to start using them myself. I especially like the idea of getting on someone’s blog roll list! That’s pretty cool. Apart from the SEO benefits, it’s just the ultimate compliment that someone would want to do that.
Thanks Sean for the education and info.
Lina
You are learning more and more everyday Lina, and it’s obviously something you are enjoying. Happy linking!
Regards – Sean
Hi Sean
I know what you are talking about when you say this takes time. I have been working on this since hearing from your mid last year. Thanks for the tips. Much appreciated.
Bryan
It sure does take time Bryan, that’s why a lot of people quit before they see any results. Keep up the good work mate, and the results will come.
Regards – Sean
It has been a month since I last read this post, and it’s even clearer this time around. A slow process, but hey, nothing happens overnight really. People might say that made $X,000 in one day, but there’s a lot of work behind the scenes to make that $X,000 in one day! Shame most IM’ers never tell you that part.
You have helped make me feel that the time and energy required in this world of backlinks is really worth it. At times I think I really can’t continue trying to do all these things.
But you make such sense about the value of backlinks and how eventually if I flatter enough people by linking to them etc it will pay off.
So, I am off to another set of backlinking and will try to take your sage advice to heart.
Thanks Sean
More great info. I am in the process of building up my link network. I have feeds setup to my FB fan pages. When I setup the feeds not all the posts came over. I presume it would be helpful to take them over. If so I will do it progressively.
Also one of the fans has asked for me to put my posts on her related fan page. Will this help the link building? I am considering asking the other fans if they want to share articles amongst themselves. Surely this would help also
Hi Sean,
This is great advice. I am getting backlinks through most of these strategies. There’s only a couple of avenues that I’m not making the most of and I can change that.
I just need to work on building relationships with other bloggers so that I can negotiate for some blogroll links. I’m surprised at how much of Internet Marketing is about teamwork and networking.
I like the suggestion about having the same keyphrases in the linked-to and the linked-from pages. I have posted something on mindset mastery on my blog so that all my comments on the mindset mastery series can link to it. Hopefully this will result in some generous Google votes.
If I write comments in magazines & newspapers on articles related to my website, & I leave a link to my site, is that very effective SEO?
Yes, linking back to your site from other online articles can be beneficial Lee. The quality of the link will depend on the quality of the site, for example the PR of the site. Also note the nofollow sites give little or no SEO value, whereas search engines will follow links from dofollow sites. If the backlink is an anchored text link, even better
Solid and actionable SEO advice in plain English, Sean. Happy to discover you through Twitter and pass on the usable info to others there.
Seems like the search engine spiders are teaching survival of the fittest. Sites which rule in search remain those that avoid black hat or “stuffing” techniques and are truly the most useful/popular domains.
As Honest Abe said, You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. : )
Hi Sean
To date I have read over 880 posts of very valuable information across many of your blogs and I am still landing on posts that are amazingly informative, with great tips for success. This one is no exception. I can see the high value of having back links pointing to my site and as you say, it is better to have relevant sites with good reputations pointing to my site.
There are so many pointers here that I have bookmarked this and will follow the list and implement back links on my blog after the competition when I have some time again. Thank you for this great information.
Great to hear you are soaking up the information and finding it beneficial Elly
I can see benefit of backlinks I hadn’t thought of going further than the page I was reading but now I can see the benefit of reading all the posts, not just the one I land on, and msking comments on all I feel worthy of a comment
Thanks Sean,
Creating backlinks can be fun if you have the time & enjoy chatting in forums or with people on other blogs. I am using some of the strategies you have listed here & thanks for the new ones, this internet marketing is so much fun!
It does take some time and the tricky thing about it is that yahoo,google and msn does not weight your backlinks the same so you get kind of hopeless but take it from me guys just keep backlinking it will pay off.
I’ve been reading your blog a few times and this is the first time I feel like I need to comment. Very nice writing indeed.
Thank you for your sharing useful article. This ideas is very useful for me. I am currently doing researches on various topics. Your article will assist me in my research.