By now most people know the importance of building links for SEO purposes, but what is that is the best way to maximise your results?
I thought I’d put together a hard and fast guide here for those playing at home to get the most from their link building.
1) You want links from as many places as possible that are built in a randomised way this will make the links seem more natural giving you more brownie points. Whenever building links you don’t want to make any sort of pattern, it is believed that search engine algorithms will pick up your tracks and deem them less powerful.
Some of the places you may want to include in your efforts are: social media sites, forums, article directories, posts on other blogs, comments on other blogs, footer links, Press releases, Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages, submit articles to article directories.
2) Social Media Sites. Make sure you put a link back to your site in everyone of your profiles, it seems quite obvious but you would be surprised how many people forget. Make groups that add value and place links back to your site. You can make groups with most social networks these days.
3) Nofollow Vs Dofollow links. Many people say you want only dofollow links but I tend to disagree because if you are making only dofollow then you are making a pattern and like I said above the Search Engines want real relevant sites not obviously manufactured links, so you definitely want a mixture of nofollow and dofollow links.
4) Commenting on other peoples blogs is an obvious choice however can be time consuming to find relevant blogs. If you type =”YOUR KEYWORD” do follow blog into the the big G it will bring up a list of dofollow blogs that you can easily comment on. Just make sure that you add value and use common sense or you just piss people off and you won’t get any links anyway.
The other way if you have a wordpress blog is to use the comment luv plugin, this allows people to see a snipet of your last blog post and will increase the chances that people will come and comment on your blog as well. You can also use http://www.commentluv.com/ to search for blogs in your niche that are using the plugin.
5) You want to get links from Joe Ant, Yahoo and DMOZ they have a price an are well worth it because spammers don’t spend money links from these places so the search engines will view your site as more genuine if you are listed here.
6) High Page Rank pages can add a bit of juice to your site, just remember that the PR is for the big G only so if you want results from the other Search engines don’t expect the PR to do ounce of good.
7) Anchor text; anchor text is the word(s) on the other site that someone may click to come to your site. Where possible you want to make about 40% of the anchor text your keywords, 40% related keywords and 20% of anchor text totally unrelated so they seem as natural as possible.
8 ) Internal links (links between pages on your site) should be a part of any link building strategy and are usually overlooked by most people. The beauty of internal links is that you have 100% control over the anchor text and the page that you want linked to. Don’t make too many links out going from each page, try and keep it below 2% of the total amount of words per page.
If you use images to link internally be sure to make the alt text one of the keywords that are on the page you are linking to.
9) If you have useful information on your site send emails to other website owners that may benefit from adding your site to their useful links. This can be very time consuming but well worth it if you can get links from a Government or Educational site. Remember value is the key 
10) Social Bookmarking sites can be great places to get links from and also provide a bit of traffic as well, because other people can see what you have bookmarked and follow the links. Make sure you mix it up a bit an bookmark other peoples sites as well, you can get kicked out if it seems that you are just bookmarking your own all the time (it’s a form of spam) also search engines can pick up patterns if you only bookmark your own. Also ask at the bottom of your article post whatever, that if people liked it bookmark it for future reference, hint hint!
One powerful tool you can use to submit to a heap of different social bookmarking sites on auto pilot is www.bookmarkerdemons.com. There is a small investment for this, but it is well worth it for the amount of links you can build and traffic you can get on virtual autopilot.
11) Type in keywords that you want to rank for and get the URL’s of the first 20 sites then go to http://www.backlinkwatch.com and type your competitors domains and see where they getting their links from and do the same.
12) If you have a business place it in local/relevant business directories. Most of them can be of little use, but some can yeild some traffic and good links.
13) See if your suppliers or customers will link to your site. If you have a reputable brand they will probably be happy to put your logo and a link on their site.
14) Find other complementary business that you could swap links with, these are called reciprocal links. They may not be as powerful as one way links from other sites however once again you want a bunch of links from lots of different places.
15) Post and answer questions in forums related to your topic and make you signature link look interesting. This can be a good way of building credibility building links and getting a little traffic if you add value to the forum.
16) Submit your feeds to feed directories and other people might republish your feed pointing links back to your site in the process.
18) Give testimonials for products that you have purchased in your market good people will give you a link in the testimonial.
19) Get links from pages that don’t have too many out going links. It has been said that pages with many out going links can be frowned upon and no credit given.
20) get involved in community groups and if they have a website you may be able to get listed.
21) Write quality articles and submit them to article directories like ezine.com. They get tons of traffic everyday and you can put a quality link in the Author section. One very cool tool that you can use to distribute heaps of articles on auto pilot is www.autoarticlemarketer.com you can even put your articles in spin format so that you get hundreds of articles from one if you write them properly.
22) The other very effective tool for serious link builders is www.linksvana.org You can either choose to write (or have written) 100 word articles that get blasted out to high PR blogs with the anchor text of your choice pointing back to your site.
23) Depending on what your site is about you can get free listings form craigslist.com, you may also get a bit of traffic with this too.
24) join Google or yahoo groups related to your topic and like forum posting add value to others in the group and you will get good links and traffic.
25) If you have something important to add to Wikipedia go for it. I believe they may have change to nofollow links but if you write something good you will traffic as well as a trusted link.
26) If you have a product that you sell from your site set up an affiliate program, you will get links from the affiliate directory as well affiliates. Obviously you won’t do this just for the links.
27) If you have a blog make the odd controversial, shocking or crazy post that is bound to get attention and links back
28) Make a prize draw or give away (that is industry related) for the person that writes the best review about or article about your site or product. Most will link to it.
29) get a programmer to make useful tools, plugins with links in built or get a designer to make a nice theme with a link in the footer.
30) Like most things in life consistency is king. You want to continually build links from many different sources to keep the SEO love flowing to your site.
31) make sure you build links to every page of your site not just the home page as this seems very manafactured and we don’t like that right…
32) If you see a site that says you can buy 20,000 links for $50….. RUN. Don’t ever get links from a place that sells cheap links like this you will most likely be removed from search engines never to appear again.
33) With new sites don’t build too many links at once. If you put up a new site just build one or two every couple days for the first month and then slowly increase the number (randomised of course 
) over time.
I hope this has been somewhat useful, have I missed anything in my haste?
Nudge me to add to this post.
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