Here are 10 great link building techniques to get you and your website headed in the right direction. One of the most important and often challenging tasks of an internet marketer is to build lots of quality inbound links to their (or clients) website. Quantity, quality, keyword anchor text and link diversity are all important when building links.

I’m writing this post with some of the great link building techniques I’ve learned through the years (I’m holding a little back for future posts!).

I want to encourage you all to share some other link building techniques I missed in the comment section so that we will all have a great resource to bookmark. So PLEASE, if you know some other great ways to build inbound links, please, please share them below.

1. For number one, we’ll start off with some good old school, but still an effective way of building inbound links (not to mention one of the easiest) – Directory links. This is often where I begin when I start a new linkbuilding campaign. To make this task even easier, I use semi-automatic directory submitters.
2. Article Marketing – article marketing is a great way to build content and inbound links at the same time. There are hundreds of article sites and most let you include some anchor text links in your resource box. Be sure to not go crazy with the amount of links in your article and resource/bio box, most article sites do not allow more than two links. Again, I use article submitting software to make this easier and faster. It is a great feeling to load your article once, press a button and walk away knowing that you’re building hundreds of inbound links while you go and do something else for an hour!



3. Social bookmarking – there are tons of social bookmarking sites out there now. Normally, I am only active or somewhat active on a few of those and the rest I just kind of use for mindless link building submissions. Many let you use anchor text in your link. This may surprise you, but I use semi-automatic submission services for this as well!
4. Linkbait – since we are coming off of social bookmarking, now would be a good time to mention linkbait. Linkbait is great for those social sites (and social news sites like digg, mixx etc.) that you are active on. You basically have a hot news story, image, video or article that will create buzz. If your linkbait catches and goes popular, you could have thousands and thousands of inbound links to your website or blog.
5. Press Releases – press releases are a great way to not only build inbound links, but exposure as well. Be sure to optimize your press releases properly for seo!
6. Link requests – I’m not going to lie to you, this is one link building technique that I normally don’t do too often. I have mixed feelings about it. I mainly only do this tactic when I have extra time or I come across a good match. It can be powerful, but as most online marketers, I normally have more work than I have time to get it all done and this step often becomes overlooked. Basically, you send link requests to other webmasters alerting them of your value in hopes of a link back.
7. Do-follow blog commenting – this is becoming one of my favorite ways to build links. One reason is I just try to squeeze in 2 a day. It doesn’t take long and can be very effective. Not so much for just the inbound do-follow link, but for the potential natural traffic that can come with good comments. Notice I said GOOD comments, if you don’t have a GOOD relevant comment to contribute, don’t bother leaving one. Many bloggers manually review comments and if they are spammy or worthless then they won’t get approved and you just wasted you and the webmasters time. Good comments can often encourage people to click your link and check you out, and if they like what they see, they often come back! There are some good resources for finding do-follow blogs; I’ll cover them in a future post. So, quick summary – NO SPAMMING!
8. Blog commenting – most blogs are no-follow, which means you get no link juice for your link, but, like I said in number 7, if you contribute good comments on popular and high-traffic sites/blogs, many will click the link and check out your site which is just as valuable as having a link that follows in my opinion.
9. Do-follow websites and profiles – searchenginepeople wrote a good post listing some sites that feature do-follow links opportunities in profile sections of their websites. Not sure what kind of traffic these can generate as they are often off topic, but most let you include anchor text so it’s all good.
10. I wasn’t going to include #10 to encourage you to comment, but I’ve been reading a lot lately about link building techniques such as mining broken links and potentially dangerous links and requesting those broken or harmful links be re-linked to your site.

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