How to Generate Quality Backlinks to Your Site for Free

A great part of proper SEO (search engine optimization), is generating good quality backlinks to your site. There are many ways to go about this. Trading links with other websites is one way of getting backlinks but the links are much more valuable when they are "one way" backlinks, meaning they do not require a link back from your site. If other sites are linking to yours without requiring a link back, it tells the search engines your site has value and is relevant, especially if the linking site has a high page rank. Here are a few ways of generating these types of links for free.

Find sites that use a guestbook script that are relevant to your site. Sign their guestbook, leave a comment relevant to the subject matter, compliment them on their site and leave your site link. Try to use anchor text to make the backlink to your site include keywords, eg. if your name is what is linked to your site, chose a name with keywords embedded such as golf king, or free credit report.

Write articles about things related to your site and publish them in the major article directories. Make sure your main keywords are included in the title of the article as well as throughout the body of the article. Include a link back to your site in the author resource area, usually at the footer of the article. Again use anchor text in your link so you will have relevant keywords linking back to your site instead of the tired old "click here".

Place free classified ads around the net. Find free classifieds sites and post ads with anchor text links back to your site. This is easy and quick and depending on the site's traffic, could get you some decent backlinks and traffic. Be careful with this one, don't place your links on low quality, spammy ad sites such as FFA links sites and spammy classifieds sites. This could hurt you much more than help you in the SEO game. As a general rule, if there are tons of sites all using the same script and looking almost identical to each other or if the pages are nothing but links or ads, best to stay away from those.

Submit your site to directories. There are loads of directories that are free to place an ad to your site. There are general directories as well as more targeted niche directories to get backlinks from a variety of sources. Place your site link on as many high PR directories as possible, some of their page rank and traffic will leak back to your site eventually.

Create related sites or blogs to link back from. You can create your own linking sites and blogs to help gain relevant backlinks. You will need to make sure these sites are hosted on a different server than your main site you are linking back to or you could be penalized by the search engines. Create good quality sites with a variety of relevant content linking back, don't make spammy looking sites and expect them to do well. A free way to do this is by starting blogs at either wordpress.com or blogger.com. You don't have as much control over the layout and content as you would on your own hosted site but they are free and on different servers than your main site, they also tend to get spidered by the search engines frequently. Post quality content that will attract readers and place your anchor text links throughout the copy and you will find the search engine spiders visiting your main site more often.

Post comments on related blogs. Find blogs that are similar in subject matter to your site and post comments to the posts with a link back to your site. This works well for a couple of reasons, search engines love blogs because they tend to have new content regularly, and people actually read those comments if the post was interesting enough, so you could get some foot traffic that way too. Post helpful comments related to the post, do not post spammy comments or one line comments as these will most likely be discarded by the site admin. Most blogs nowadays, use the "nofollow" tag on their comment links. This tells search engines not to follow those links. Although you may get some foot traffic from nofollow links you won't get much search engine love from it. Look for blogs to post to that do not use the "nofollow" tag on their posts. You can tell by looking at the source code of the page and find the comment links and see if they have "nofollow" embedded in the code. There is a much easier way to do this, see the "supporting links" section for the link.

Join social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites allow you to post links to sites you find interesting in hopes that others will find them interesting too. This is a great opportunity to get others to see your links as well as have them count as valuable backlinks. Just use the sites bookmarking utility to bookmark your sites pages and add relevant keywords to the title, description, etc. It is a good idea to also bookmark similar sites in your niche so your links look more natural. If the social sites think you are only bookmarking your own site's links, they could ban you.

These are only a few ways to get good quality backlinks to your site. Try different things and think outside the box and you will come up with plenty more. Remember the least used methods can be very powerful so use your brain and get creative.