7 Easy, Worthwhile Places to Get “Back Links” to Your Website

If there's one question I get more than any other from new Clients, it's this one: "Will my new website be search engine-optimized?"

Fifteen years ago, a ‘search engine-optimized' website may have been enough to get you ranking well on search engines. Now-a-days though, a ‘search engine-optimized' website is only your ticket to the game. It is the bare minimum you can and should do to rank well in search engines.

Informal studies have been done on search engines and it's believed that only 20% of your ranking is determined by how well your website is optimized. This means including keywords and using them in the right places, making sure your URLs are search-engine-friendly, etc only account for 20% of your ranking!

What makes up the other 80%? You guessed it! Backlinking!

Backlinking is the process of getting links from relevant, high-quality websites back to your website. Once you've finished some basic, search engine optimization of your website's content, backlinking is the best investment of your time and money if improving your website's ranking in Google is your goal.

Let's say you invest 10 hours of your time in excruciating detail making sure your homepage is perfectly optimized. Your competitor spends only 2 hours doing the most basic SEO but also spends a couple hours getting one or two backlinks. Who's site will rank higher? Your competitor's hands-down!

Without further ado, here's 7 easy, free places to get decent backlinks to your website.

• WordPress
• Tumblr
• Live Journal
• Blogger
• TypePad
• Squidoo
• HubPages

The above are all very popular FREE blogging websites. Why list there? The answer is bit technical, but when you create a new blog on those websites, it has a "Page Rank" of 0 (the lowest) but it's also under the wordpress.com/tumblr.com domains which have Page Ranks of 8 or 9 (the highest.)

Now here's the backlinking process and what you need to do:

• Write an article relevant to your field, containing your keywords. At the top and bottom of your article, be sure to include a link back to your website. Also, make sure that link contains your keywords in the text. For example, in your link, don't say something bland and general like, "Click here to visit our site". Instead, say something inclusive of your keywords like, "Toronto website design services offered here."
• Create 7 different versions of the article above making sure to change titles, link text, most of the body text, etc. You can use a tool like http://thebestspinner.com/ or http://www.jetspinner.com/ (the latter has a free version) to create these new versions or you can do it manually. An even better approach of course is to use 7 completely different articles if you happen to have some unused articles lying around.
• Go to each of the seven websites listed above
• Sign up with each and create your free blog
• Paste a different version of the article in each of the 7 blogs.
• You're done!

Be sure to check your ranking in search engines before and then a month after trying this to so you can track your improvement in ranking.

Good luck!