10 Ways You Can Generate Quality Backlinks To Boost Your WordPress SEO
This is the third part of An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO – in part two I discussed the importance of keyword research and how essential it is if you want to optimize your site for the search engines and receive more traffic. However, you will be unlikely to get a good ranking with Google unless you can get some backlinks to your site.
This post discusses the importance of backlinks and how you can go about getting some high-quality ones that will help push your site up the search engine rankings.
What Are Backlinks?
If you are new to SEO the term “backlink” may be unfamiliar to you – a backlink is essentially a link that points back to your website from another site. Search engines rank sites based on a number of factors, but of particular importance is the number of backlinks a site has pointing to it. To take a basic example – if you have two sites attempting to rank for the phrase “premium wordpress themes” and one site has 10 links pointing to it (using the phrase as the link text) and the other has 100, search engines will most likely rank the site with more backlinks above the other site.
Not All Backlinks Are Created Equal
It’s important to note, however, that not all backlinks carry the same weight – some types of backlinks will provide much more value than others, and you’ll want to target the ones that will have maximum impact on your search engine rankings. One factor is the relevance of the backlinks that are linking to your site. For example, if the majority of the 100 links that point to the site mentioned above are mostly irrelevant to the site’s topic (e.g. links from Wedding sites pointing to a site on Premium WordPress Themes), then the search engines are likely to move that site down the rankings. On the other hand, if the site with only 10 links has highly relevant/related backlinks, it could potentially outrank a site with many more links.
The relevance of backlinks is not the only factor to take into consideration – the quality of the link is also very important. That is, how well regarded is the site that is linking to you? If you have a link from an authority site (e.g. BBC, CNN, Wikipedia, etc.) then it will have much more impact than a link to your site from a new blog with only a couple of posts on it. So a site with only a few highly-relevant backlinks from high-authority sites has the potential to outrank sites that have many more backlinks where the relevance is not as good and the quality of the sites linking is poorer.
Maximizing The Impact Of Backlinks
In your SEO efforts you want to try and get backlinks from authority sites where the link text used matches the keyword phrases you intend to target. So, for example, if another website links to your site using http://www.vooshthemes.com – that’s really good – it’s a backlink to your site and the search engines will recognize that and credit your site with that link.
However, what would be even better is if one of your keyword phrases was used as the link text – so if the link was something like “Premium WordPress Themes” your site would get credit for the backlink and the words used in the link. The search engines would then potentially move you up the rankings for that particular keyword phrase.
This highlights just how important the words you use in your backlinks are – so often you’ll see sites that say something like – “Please click here to visit my site”. This is such a waste as it means the site being linked to gets credit for the term “click here” – which isn’t very helpful at all! So, whenever you link to your website from other sites, always try and incorporate your keyword phrases into the link text. It’s worth getting into the habit of doing this as it’s absolutely key if you want your site to move up the rankings.
Where Can You Get Quality Backlinks?
There are lots of different places where you can get high-quality backlinks that can help improve your rankings. Remember – you’re after links that will provide maximum impact – below is a list of some of the places where you can get these types of links.
Directories
There are several online directories that you can submit your site to – in particular, you’ll want to submit your site to DMOZ. It can take a while for your site to get listed (as each submission is manually reviewed), but once it does it can give your site a nice boost. If you’ve got cash to burn you might also want to target the Yahoo! Directory – it’s quite expensive, but if your site is listed it can really help your rankings.
Blog Comments
Find the leading blogs in your market/area of interest and start making on comments on their posts and include a backlink to your site. However, ensure that you don’t spam them with your link – add value to their site with thoughtful and useful comments that contribute to the general discussion taking place.
RSS Feeds
Given that you have a WordPress site, you will more than likely have an RSS feed that you can distribute to a number of different sources. The good thing about this is that you get a link to your site when you submit your site’s feed, but you’ll also automatically get a new link each time you add a new post to your site. Feedage.com and Feedagg.com are two sites that are worth submitting your site to.
Internal Links
You should get in the habit of linking to older posts on your site when writing new content. This has a double benefit in that it carries some weight with the search engines and it also promotes your older content to readers who may not have seen it before.
Article Directories
Submitting articles to article directory sites can be a great way to get some quality backlinks to your site. They can also send a nice amount of traffic as well! There are hundreds of these types of directories, although two of the main ones you’ll want to check out are EzineArticles and GoArticles.
Video Sites
If you create some videos related to your site and then distribute them to sites like YouTube you can get some quality backlinks coming into your site. Again, this has a double benefit in that you get good backlinks, but you can also get lots of traffic from these sites (if the videos you’ve created are interesting and add value). TubeMogul is a site that you’ll want to check out for distributing your videos to a number of different sources.
.edu and .gov links
Links from sites that have .edu (educational sites) or .gov (governmental sites) in their domain names carry a lot of weight in Google. If you can get links from these sites it can give you a nice push up the rankings.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites enable people to bookmark all their favorite sites and pages in one central place (examples include Digg, Propeller, and Delicious). You can bookmark your own stuff to help market it to other people and to get a backlink to your site. An even better approach, however, is to create great content that people will automatically want to add to their own social bookmarking accounts.
Web 2.0 Sites
There are several sites out there that enable you to create pages on a particular topic and then include a link back to your site. Such sites include Squidoo, Hubpages, and Scribd. All of these sites are regarded as high-authority by Google, so links from them to your site can really help improve your rankings.
Great Content
Perhaps the most important of all! Consistently create great content that others want to link back to. Sure, you don’t have any control over the link text that others use, but the number of sites that link to you is important to Google and this will have a large impact on the ranking your site gets for a range of different keyword phrases.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has highlighted the importance of backlinks in improving your search engine rankings and the wide array of different places you can get these links from. In the next part of An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO I want to start focusing more specifically on SEO for WordPress and will provide a range of quick power tips that you can implement straightaway to help improve your search engine rankings!
Table of Contents
1. Introduction and Guide Overview
2. Researching Great Keywords To Help Drive Traffic
3. 10 Ways You Can Generate Quality Backlinks To Boost Your WordPress SEO
4. Ten Quick Power Tips To Drive More Visitors To Your WordPress Site
5. WordPress SEO Issues – Managing Duplicate Content Effectively
6. Top 8 Free WordPress SEO Plugins
7. 8 Tips For Promoting Your WordPress Site
8. Great Tools For Analyzing The Impact Of Your WordPress SEO
November 30th, 2009 at 9:44 am
nice article. thanks for the tips!
November 30th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Thanks Seraph!
November 30th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
A lot of my own backlinks come from both blog posts and trackbacks, this is a great list of some other techniques, thanks!
December 1st, 2009 at 3:43 am
Thanks Amber – glad the list was of some help
December 1st, 2009 at 4:25 am
yessss
December 1st, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Hi Chris,
I opened your article because of the relation you made with WorrdPress. But the techniques you are describing are more general link building strategies/tips, isn’t it/ This will work for any site, it is not related to WP I think.
Anyway, thanks for the list and helpful tips anyway.
best regards, Robbert
December 1st, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Hi Robbert – you’re right – the techniques described in this post will work for all types of sites (including WordPress). In the first two parts of this WordPress SEO series I wanted to focus on some of the core concepts related improving your search engine rankings (i.e. keyword research and getting backlinks) – now that this has been covered, the forthcoming posts will provide more specific tips on how you can optimize a WordPress site for the search engines.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:24 pm
This article has been shared on favSHARE.net. Go and vote it!
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:34 am
RSS feeds can be very effective if you have a huge list of sites to ping. It’s simply a matter of making more and more content regularly and the visitors will come flooding.
December 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 am
@Alister – that’s true – and the default installation of WordPress automatically pings lots of sites for you which is very handy. However, I think it requires a little more than writing lots of content on a regular basis to get more traffic to your site. This certainly helps, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently writing quality content if you want people to come back to your site in the future.
December 7th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Nice collection SEO and backlink guidance Chris. You also have some very nice WP themes.
I thought I’d try to add to your backlink information here by letting you and your readers know about a new tool that I created to track your backlinks (PR, URL, anchor text, contact info, etc.) and that automatically verifies if your backlinks are still live. Very useful if you exchange links, etc. It’s free, but does require that the user provide a link for use. You can find it at http://www.backlinkreporter.com. It’s new, so I’d love some feedback on it!
December 9th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Hi Chris, I have been always interested in your post. Needless to say, link building topics are hot for me.
I’ve tried ways to get backlinks like link exchange, article submissions, blog commenting, forum posting and the likes and they are effective.
I really agree that posting worthwhile content matters a lot.
And Dmoz is quite hard. They are really very strict with the submissions. Hope you can post more topics about DMOZ.
Thanks a lot for your very helfpul post. Staying tuned! =)
December 9th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Cheers insomnia – glad you found the post useful.
December 9th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Great article thanks!
Always useful to get some good advice on ’seo-ing’ a wordpress blog.
Out of interest wrt link text, any guesses (without cheating) who ranks for ‘click here’ ?
Its an obvious one, and quite old news but always impresses me.
December 9th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Thanks Keith! Sorry – I had to cheat
It is quite obvious when you think about it, although I wasn’t able to guess correctly – I wont spoil it for others …
December 17th, 2009 at 6:07 am
Great Tips, thanks for sharing that.
February 16th, 2010 at 3:04 am
Great article thanks you!
May 8th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
first two parts of this WordPress SEO series I wanted to focus on some of the core concepts related improving your search engine rankings
May 22nd, 2010 at 10:07 am
Hi chris,
well nice list about backlinks and to the point.The straight worrds of the article are the key and usefull for others.
Thank you
Guri
June 8th, 2010 at 10:01 am
Yeah, I felt the difference in Alexa ranking after starting add backlinks
June 20th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Try adding some backlinks from high PRE forums. Just join and put your url in your profile link.
July 6th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
very informative, thanks for the nice details
July 7th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Thank you so much for your fantastic article and great tips!
July 28th, 2010 at 11:03 am
hey chris… nice blog.
question for you… if i bookmark from my pc to someone else’s content, does that count as a backlink for the site i bookmarked?
thanks,