Backlinks makes you money. Top SEO experts know this because higher rankings means more traffic and more traffic means more money.
This is why they often blow a small fortune on buying back links. There's no doubt that buying a couple of high page rank back links can significantly boost your rankings. However, the "small guy" has one advantage and that is the ability to get out there and build thousands of free backlinks.
Free back links is probably one of the easiest ways to significantly improve your Google Page Rank without spending any money. By investing some of your time, you can literally get backlinks from thousands of websites - many of them authority sites that can pass their value down to your page rank.
Because building free backlinks is so time consuming many SEO companies can't afford to invest time in it. Just because it is free, you should never underestimate just how effective it can be. If you consistently build free back links, you can get your site up to a PR5 easily.
Because getting free backlinks is so time consuming you have to do it right to maximize the linkjuice you get from each and every link. Spending hours building links that carry a low value is just a waste of time. There are 3 big mistakes that most website owners make when building free back links.
Link building Mistake #1
Reciprocal links used to be the link building strategy of choice a couple of years ago. Basically it's an exchange of links between 2 sites. You link to me and I link to you. We both benefit, right? Well, not anymore. Reciprocal links are fast becoming absolute as Google is catching on to this practice. With link farms springing up all over the net, getting thousands of reciprocal links became too easy. One way links carries a lot more value and although reciprocal links are an easy way to get free links, it is time intensive and probably not even worth it anymore.
Link building Mistake #2
Google's page rank algorithm is getting smarter and smarter. One of the big changes in the way page rank is calculated is Google's ability to determine relevancy. This is where anchor text comes in. Anchor text is the highlighted hypertext that contains the actual link. What this allows Google to see is what the link is for. It helps them determine how relevant the link is based on the keywords and the site it's linking to and from. When building free links you should always try and use anchor text in your back links. It will give you some additional link juice.
Link building Mistake #3
These days a lot of forums and blogs have a tag called the "nofollow tag" which basically tells the search engine spiders not to follow links in the site. If you get a backlink from a site with a nofollow tag it won't be picked up by the search engines and it won't count as a link. Although there's a lot of debate on whether these actually count as links it is probably not worth your time and effort to build links from nofollow sites. Get yourself the SEO Addon for Firefox which will automatically highlight nofollow links.
Building free back links is all about getting as much link juice as possible for every link you build. It can take a lot of time to build free backlinks and maximizing the effects of each link goes without saying. By just avoiding these 3 mistakes you can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your links. Regardless of what you do, you have to keep building links. Links will get you ranked and links will make you more money.
3 Stupid Mistakes in Getting Free Backlinks
