Off-site SEO development (or “backlinking”) involves conscientiously applying certain good rules of thumb with consistency.

What is a backlink and why does my website need them?

Backlinking plays a huge role in determining where pages rank in search engines like Google. In addition to affecting your google pagerank — which is a score generated by Google’s rating system based on their proprietary algorithm that may or may not reflect actual ranking quality — backlinks will actually affect your specific position for any given keyword. Ideally backlinks will come from pages that have similar keyword composition to your target keyword or niche, and will contain the keywords that you want your website to rank for, which ideally will also exist in some form in the title.

It’s my opinion that the best links are the ones that come from various readers that find your site via social media means such as facebook or digg, or other high quality websites I’ll get to in a moment.

Where can you get backlinks from?

Other websites, of course! But to be more specific… Great sources of backlinks include:

• Guest blogging with a link back in the biographical section.. This is best when done within your niche. Check out myblogguest.com and other communities dedicated to this.
• High-quality link directories with appropriate categorization, and demonstrating proper indexing in subcategories. Find some of these from one of my personal favorites, VileSilencer.
• Dmoz.org. The king of directories. Period. The catch to this  is, generally you MUST provide them with the actual title of your business, and if it doesn’t contain the anchor text keyword you wanted, you’re out of luck.
• HARO – Help A Reporter Out. I’ve not personally gotten links or interviewed from this, but I could see it being useful for the patient. Also check out their twitter.
• Biography links obtained via distribution of articles that provide information of value to the reader, and hosted on high-quality article directories, ezines or blogs. Similar to guestblogging.
• High profile web2.0 sites with a high pagerank. Just a few examples of these: Digg.com, Reddit.com,  and a large number of others. Often it is best if your readers submit your content to these sites. Incidentall,  Digg and Reddit both have advertising programs if you’d like to take advantage of building a relationship with those kinds of readers. These sites are often targeted by spammers and do a fairly good job of catching overly commercial content with little community value.
• Article directories. These accept content which they display on their site, and in turn give authors backlinks. There’s a very, very large number of these. See this ranked list of the top ones out there.

Awful sources of backlinks include:

• While there may be (debatable) value of certain nofollow links, for all intents and purposes if it is nofollow it is far, far less likely to be valuable for indexing in organic search results. To be able to view which links are nofollow get the Quirk SearchStatus plugin for Firefox. (Also mentioned in my Google Pagerank post).
• Likewise, commenting on unrelated or spammy blogs which only provide a nofollow link is also not advised.

Not following these basic rules of thumb will lead to either making very slow progress/market penetration, or worse being penalized for associating yourself with the wrong crowd to begin with.

So how can you differentiate between a good site to attempt to get a link from, and one to avoid altogether? The “Google pagerank” is one metric that may at least be somewhat correlative of a higher quality website (though, manipulating pagerank may not be that useful).. However, one other simple method is to simple try a few longtail keyword searches copied from the title or one of the first uses of text encapsulated by the <h1> tag or header text of a section of one of the more prominent pages of a website you’re hoping to get a link from. If it’s nowhere to be found, that might be telling.

Often the best way to get links directly related to your niche is to directly submit your posts to sites that will accept them, or even personally write a note to other webmasters, or better still link to content on other sites that have some value. Then wait. Some of them will notice from their statistics  showing referrers and do you a good turn. We’ll call this one the karmic approach.

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