Building Backlinks 101 - Methods Of Building Backlinks To Your Website

Building backlinks to your website is essential to getting your site ranked high with the search engines.

In addition to lots of unique content, the most important thing you can do to improve your search engine ranking is building backlinks.

• Blogs

Blogs are one of the best ways of building backlinks to your website. By adding your website URL to the comments you make on other blogs that carry the same theme as your niche; you can quickly build a number of good one way backlinks to your site.

• Forum Posting

Forum posting is a great way to build backlinks if you add your URL to your signature when commenting.

Never post your URL directly into the discussion forums unless you want to take the chance of getting banned and removed from the forum.

Leaving your URL in the discussion is considered spam and is not an acceptable method of building backlinks.

• Social Networks

Social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, and a multitude of others are exceptionally great places for building backlinks to your website.

Millions of people visit these sites daily to make friends or to promote their businesses, products, and services. When you register or sign up to these sites, post links to your website and include them with comments you make in your "friend's" profile. You can generate a huge number of backlinks to your website using these social media sites.

• Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites are another area where you can create backlinks to your website.

Bookmarking sites like Delicious and Furl are great places for building backlinks by bookmarking your website. If your site is unique and interesting enough, other people will add your bookmark to their "favorite sites" which will quickly generate one way links back to your site.

• Articles

Publishing unique articles and including links back to your website in your resource box, is a great method of building backlinks to your website and to promote your products or services.

It's also a good idea to include your URL in the author's biographical section and hyperlinking your website URL in keywords to attract backlinks.

Submit your articles either manually or with automated directory submitters to the various article directories, to get the highest visibility.

If your articles are informative and interesting enough; they will be picked up by other webmasters and published on their websites or in their newsletters.

Because they are obliged to publish your resource box, in return for using your article, you will soon have a large number of backlinks pointing to your website. This method of building backlinks is extremely effective when you flood many article directories with your content.

• Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are an early method for building backlinks that still work; but even though you can still get some quality links from relevant websites and may get a slightly higher search engine ranking, hooking up with the wrong website can severely penalize your site's ranking.

Be very careful using link exchanges when building backlinks to your website; they can sometimes be more of a detriment than a benefit.