Getting Good Backlinks to Your Site

Here is a pretty common type of question people have about SEO and link-building…

Hey MrSEO, I have another question if I may...
If you wanted to get good back links to a site what would be YOUR top three things
that you would do...?
I'm using videos with trafficGeyser and I'm getting frustrated that MarketSamurai
is not picking  them up as back links...
Should I just stick to Linkvana and ditch Traffic Geyser?

First – some great tools got a mention in that question. So, in case you’re new to all this (or you’ve been living under a rock):

Market Samurai is the Swiss Army Knife of doing stuff online. If you do Internet Marketing you NEED Market Samurai – I use it almost every day and honestly don’t know what I’d do without it! It is worth keeping in mind though that Market Samurai is mostly automating checks you can do yourself manually through existing services like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Market Samurai scrapes data from Google for keyword research and ranking reports, and Yahoo! SiteExplorer for backlink analysis.

Linkvana is a one-way link-building service based around a massive blog network (controlled by Linkvana). The blogs all have high page rank – generally PR-2 or above and essentially being a member of Linkvana gives you the ability to post your content (with your links embedded) to these blogs. It is worth noting that the nature of blog posts means that you get a nice high-PR “in context” link while your post is fresh (and on the front page which has high-PR), and then for a little bit longer while your post is still linked from the home page (through “Recent Posts” sidebar widget) – but the high volume nature of these blogs means that you will eventually slip from the front page altogether. At that point, your link is buried on a page deep in the site, which probably has very few inbound links and most probably a zero page-rank – so basically that link is worth less to you once it drops from the front page.

In other words, Linkvana links are particularly useful in the short term and worth having for building trust rank (lots of links to your site from different sites), but not a long-term answer and certainly not the only place you should be getting links. Link variety is important.

TrafficGeyser is a content distribution service that is most famous for it’s video “spinning” and distribution capabilities, but can also distribute other types of content. Like TubeMogul, one of the benefits of TrafficGeyser is that it enables you to upload your video once and distribute it to multiple sites (e.g. YouTube, Revver, Vimeo, etc.). Of course, you can also embed links in your video “description” back to your web site, effectively gaining you a backlink from sites like YouTube.

In addition to links, TrafficGeyser can help you get natural traffic if your videos are compelling (and have a call to action to come visit your site!)

OK – so to the question at hand…

Firstly, why isn’t Market Samurai picking up the Traffic Geyser links? First thing I’d check is that you are definitely CREATING the links properly with your video submissions… It is easy mistake for example to simply write out your site address as text (e.g. www.steveovens.com) instead of linking to your site (e.g. www.steveovens.com). Only links count!

More importantly though – remember that creating the link is a separate event from Google indexing the page that the link is on. And Yahoo! SiteExplorer indexing the page containing your link is a separate event again. (Remembering that Market Samurai is only showing you what is in Yahoo! SiteExplorer’s index). So it is entirely possible for Google to have indexed and credited you with a link that is helping your page to rank in the SERPs, but the link is not in Yahoo! yet – and therefore not showing up in Market Samurai.

The only links that can help your ranking in Google are links that are in Google’s index – i.e. Google has crawled the page that contains your link AFTER your link was placed on the page! (You can check the cached version of the page but that’s a topic for another day!).

The important thing is not whether your links show up in Market Samurai – it’s whether they are counting towards your ranking in the SERPs!

And the top three things I would do for good back links…?

There’s really only one thing I would do – simply GET MORE LINKS!

Some of the best advice I ever got was to “promote your site as though Google did not exist”. Think about that for a moment… How would you “get the word out” about your site if the search engines simply weren’t there…? You’d need to go where your target visitors hung out online (blogs, forums) and get your message in front of them.

The main reason we engage in Search Engine Optimization is because search engines are where our target visitors come from. Even with wildly successful social media sites like Facebook, when you analyze traffic sources for most sites, over 80% of traffic typically comes from search engines.

And it depends on where your site is at and what you’ve done already. If it’s brand new then you need to get it established before you go after high-PR links.

So, assuming I’d done all the “standard” SEO stuff – directory submissions, some article marketing and syndication, then Linkvana or a similar one-way linking service would probably be in the mix. Some Web 2.0 sites (www.squidoo.com, www.WetPaint.com, www.Weebly.com), linking back to your “money” site. Blog and forum comments are great for links as well as traffic. And by blog comments I mean relevant, quality, on-topic, contributing to the community posts as distinct from “I like your writing style. Please write more” crap. Video syndication is certainly a good idea – particularly if your topic lends itself to video promotion.

If you want to step it up a notch, look for an on-topic, high-traffic blog and offer to write a guest column (having your own blog and being an occasional contributor to the high-traffic blog will help here). Do a press release. Create some Link Bait (e.g. a “top 10 things I hate about…”).

Remember: Contribute to the community you’re a part of – don’t spam! Do all of this for traffic as well as links and you’ll soon start seeing great results!

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