Chances are good that you have heard building backlinks to your website will help increase your search engine ranking. Despite your best efforts, you website is not budging in its currently placement. Many website owners are under the impression that any backlink will help. That isn’t necessarily the case. When talking SEO Link Building, some links count and some links don’t.
If you are building the majority of your links through blog commenting, you may be surprised to hear most of those links are counting for anything. In fact, the search engines probably do not even see them. Most blogs these days are NoFollow. What this means is that search engines are unable to crawl their comments. No matter how many times you comment on these blogs, the number of backlinks you have is not going to change. The only traffic these links are going to bring in is people clicking through to your site.
The best links for SEO are DoFollow. These are links that search engines can see and use to determine you search engine rank.
Article directories are a great place to start building SEO backlinks. Choose reputable, high traffic sites with a good Page Rank for best results. Start submitting some quality content showcasing your expertise. Use the byline to link back to your site.
Some forums are DoFollow. Far more are NoFollow. If you find a relevant niche forum that is DoFollow enabled, create an account and start spending some time there. Include a link to your site in your signature if allowed.
Guest posting on other blogs can have two-fold results. Even if a blog has NoFollow comments, chances are high that links within their text can be crawled by search engines. In addition to the backlink, you may also be introducing yourself to a new audience.
If you are promoting a product or service for purchase, affiliates can have the same impact as guest posting. If they link to your site within their text, you may see click-throughs in addition to the backlink they have created.
When all else fails, try building some Squidoo Lenses or HubPages pointing back to your site. These sites are generally indexed quickly, and they can have relatively quick effect on your search engine ranking.
When SEO Link Building, your best bet is to create a plan optimizing several methods. Do not put all of your links on one site. Spread them around for best results.