Developing Inbound Links For Your Website

By James Beswick

Getting other sites to link to yours is a major part of SEO and there are three main ways to do this:

Pay a service to build inbound links for you
Manually trawl the web for quality sites and request links or post comments on their blog
Develop content and use webpage design to encourage audience participation and links back to your web pages

My personal feeling is that the first method is fruitless - getting backlinks takes time, so a $49 service guaranteeing hundreds of links isn't going to spend much time doing this. At best, you may end up with some additional backlinks from irrelevant sites or, more frequently, they will use comment spambots to hit thousands of sites with your URL.

This is bad for a multitude of reasons, the most important being that you harm your online reputation by spamming other sites. This blog has received multiple spam posts from a dentist in Florida who employed a link-building service, and they were genuinely shocked when I alerted them, thinking that the service was creating quality links.

The second method is more effective, providing that you target sites related to your topic of business. There are various methods of doing this, but I'd advise against link exchange software which sends out hundreds or thousands of emails to site owners like read like:

Hello,
I have found your website by searching Google for "seo techniques that really work". I think our websites have a similar theme, so I have already added your link
to my website. You can find your link here:

I receive and delete these all the time. If you request a link exchange, you should craft a personal email to the actual website owner (avoiding info@ or webmaster@ addresses) to create the best chance of a reciprocal link exchange.

Be aware that websites owners receive many, many of these emails, so the success rate is much lower than you would expect. I believe it's still a better plan to leverage relationships to build links - vendors, customers and trade organizations are much more likely to provide backlinks - even non-reciprocal ones.

With regards to commenting on blogs from popular sites, you should be very careful. Too many people fall into the trap of writing comments like:

Great post! You make some really valuable points, and I think you'd find our post at really useful!

Apart from sounding like spam, it doesn't develop a dialog, and since most blogs use nofollow (meaning the link has little value) the comment itself must be intriguing enough to invite a click. The best way to comment on blogs from a link-building approach is to contribute usefully, and find a circle of sites where you are reading the posts and building a conversation over time. This circles back to protecting and building your online reputation, which can easily be destroyed by commenting purely to generate a link.

The third method is the hardest to start but is by far the most successful. If you develop useful, creative and insightful content on your site, engage your audience, and make it easy for them to retweet, comment and share, link building comes naturally. Many sites shy away from this method because it doesn't happen fast enough, but good SEO techniques don't provide an instant payoff. Not only does this automate link-building to some extent, but by creating a community of repeat visitors who value what you have to say, it brings traffic that converts to actual business much more naturally.