January 27, 2011

Every now and again friends of mine in the web design business and clients who I do SEO work for business ask me “where is a good place to get backlinks?” In all honesty, there are a plethora of places you can obtain quality backlinks without having to give up a backlink on one of your sites. When I do on-site SEO work for a client who wants to work on getting backlinks themselves I tell them 3 main places where they can get free backlinks; online directories, any type of vbulletin web forum, and lastly friends, family or business partners with web sites of their own.

Directories are a great way for beginners to get some easy backlinks to their site. There are plenty of online web directories that offer backlinks without having to return a reciprocal link. One of the first ones I always go to is Hityotta. They allow you to submit your link without asking for a single thing in return. The site also has some pretty good traffic so you may even get a click or two from your link being on their site.

VBulletin or any other type of web forum is also a nice way to grab a back link or two. Most web forums allow you to add your link to your profile in the form of “http://www.mysite.com”, which isn’t all that beneficial since you can’t add an anchor tag. I usually add my link there anyway because a backlink is a backlink, but I also try to add a link to my signature. Be careful with this one though because some web forums are picky about allowing their members to add links to their signatures. Be sure to check the rules of a particular forum before adding a link in your signature.

Lastly, you can ask for a link on the site of any of your friends, family or business partners sites or blogs. Usually, this requires you to do a link trade with them, but in all honesty it’s completely worth it. Try to get a link or two on some of your business partners sites since it’s likely that these sites will fall under the same field as your site i.e. your home builder site/their cement delivery site. What’s nice about grabbing links from friends, family or business partners is that you will most likely get a link on their homepage which will be much more beneficial then a directory or web forum where your site would fall under a sub-directory.

Obviously, these are just a few ways for beginners in the search engine optimization game to grab some free and easy backlinks. If you have another easy way to grab some links feel free to comment below and I’ll gladly add it to this post.