Back links is indeed the Backbone of any website or blog; without back links pointing to your website, it will be very difficult for your blog to survive. due to the importance of back links, webmasters and so called SEO gurus have devised various ways of building back links that will make their website rank higher than other sites in search engine result pages.
Some have employed unethical methods (black-hat SEO) while some have been engaging in the mixture of both Ethical and unethical methods (grey, purple, blue, bla bla bla SEO). But unfortunately, the search engine giant, Google, released an update to their search algorithm that kicked those websites that manipulate SERP’s in the BUTT.
Building Back links to your blog is not that really difficult, you just need to be smart and determined. Though, there are “short cuts” that are being advocated all over the Internet, but it will surely lead to “cut short” on the long run.
If you were affected by the last Google penguin Update, I will recommend you read this post- Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice published at Search engine land.
For those looking to build back links the natural way so as to keep their blogs safe from possible punishment, here are 5 Fantastic Ways to Build Natural Back links.
1. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is indeed the foremost and best way of building back links to your site. Usually when you drop a guest post on a blog, you will be allowed at least two links pointing back to your website in your author bio; theses links are the one of the easiest and safest back links you can ever have pointing to your blog.
Guest posting is not that a difficult task, it simply involves you writing a quality article that you know will be worth publishing on another blog, after writing your article, you should look for a suitable blog in your niche and send the blog owner a mail or visiting the blogs guest posting page. To know more about Guest blogging, I recommend that you read the Guest blogging guide at youngprepro.
2. Blog Commenting
Blog commenting has been my favorite method of link building. When I started this blog, the major link building technique I employed was blog commenting and I was able to get a Google PageRank of 2 for this blog within 8 months with just blog commenting.
Blog commenting is a very easy way to build back links, but it requires time and patience. Time in the sense that you need to be visiting blogs mostly in your niche on a regular basis to drop a comment, and patience in the sense that you will need to take your time to read the article on these blogs before dropping your comment.
When using blog commenting for link building, you should avoid shallow comments like “GREAT POST”, “NICE ARTICLE” and “NICE BLOG”. These types of comment will usually end up in the trash folder and in turn result to waste of time and energy on your path. To know more about blog commenting, I recommend that you read this post- The Benefits and Power of Blog Commenting
3. Article Marketing/Submission
Article submission is an ancient method of link building on the internet; links from article directories are high quality links which every blogger should crave for. Building back links from article submission is quite straight forward, all you have to do is to write your articles and publish them on top rated article directories (like Ezinearticles and Goarticles) with a link back to your blog in the Author byline.
Apart from the link benefit you get from article marketing, you can also get loads of traffic too. So it’s just like killing two birds with one stone. I recommend you read this post- Article Marketing: Get Free Traffic and Make Your Blog Rank Higher
4. Forum Marketing
Forums boards are indeed a great place to build back links and traffic to your site. Most forum boards have a provision for a forum signature under your forum profile where you can enter a short text and links to your desired websites.
you should take advantage of this forum signature feature to build back links to your site, apart from the forum signature, you can also drop your blog links to articles that solve a fellow forum members problem but don’t you over do this, so that you will not be labeled a spammer.
There are lots of forum boards online; you can search for them on Google using your Niche keywords. Something like “Niche+forum”.
5. Mini eBooks
Mini eBooks are also a great way to build links to your blog, I call them mini eBooks because they are mini “small” usually two to three pages. You can create hundreds of mini eBooks my converting your existing blog post into a .PDF format and uploading it to various eBook Sharing Platforms like docstoc, pdfcast, scribd, and myplick.
If you don’t know, Google and other search engines usually index links that are found within eBooks, so make sure you let your blog link appear in the PDF eBook like 2-3 times. If you don’t have any idea about creating an eBook, I recommend that you read my Ultimate Guide to Writing Your First eBook.
These are Five White Hat and Ethical Methods of building back links to your blog, these methods are safe and if you are using them, you don’t need to be afraid of any Google update being it Penguin, Panda, Parrot or whatever they may name it.
Do you have any other White Hat Link building Techniques, Let us here about it in the Comment section.
About Joseph Adediji
Joseph i think that Penguin update is more about on page over optimization rather than backlinks etc. Yes building links from reputable sites is good but you need to make sure that your site has user friendly interface and valuable content.
You are right Zeeshan, The Penguin update targeted mostly on page over optimization, but it also targeted link schemes.
BTW, the reason most people do on page over optimization is to rank higher in SERPs, whereas they can achieve this higher rankings with naturally back-linking without doing the over optimization thing.
The first two are my favorites! When it comes to blog commenting, I try my level best to leave only genuine and comments which add to the post unlike the usual thank you ones people post. I also post a lot of comments on CommentLuv enabled blogs. It helps me get better backlinks easily.
Nice post
Hi Saksham, Blog commenting is really Great, I was able to get PR 2 for this blog by just leaving comments here and there on various blogs. it also help you get traffic to your blog.
Thanks Joseph for your great suggestion . Ya that update is for over optimized blog with lots of keywords and not having natural backlinks mean having backlinks on same anchor text everywhere .
White hat SEO and Marketing are recommended for long-term Google Traffic by Mutt Cutt recently.
You are right Andrew, White hat SEO is the way to go.
well from my perspective i see the steps that you mention are the right way to do it, if you stick with one method “blog commenting” its a waste of time, from my experience when i mix social networks, bookmarking, web 2, article directories and forum profiles it helps alot to achieve your target.
Hi Bandar,
Thanks for sharing your view, but blog commenting has really worked for me and many more bloggers out there. am surprised that you see it as a waste of time.
Hi, Joseph! Thank you for this post. I’m just learning SEO and I appreciate all the information you have shared here. I do manual SEO for my blog, mostly blog commenting just once a week, and I reached PR1 in 2 months
Hi Shelon,
SEO is very interesting, I hope you enjoy the learning process.
I think it was a mixture of both on and off page SEO. 3 out of 4 of our clients were resolved back to their prior position by changing the keywords they had stuffed.
While the forth was affected by the number of links that disappeared on the night of the 24th. Though his were from the UK mostly.
Either way if you follow the advice Joseph laid out in this blog post, you will be sweet.
As for our solution to penguin? Check it out here – http://www.knead.co.nz/seo/penguin-update
Hi Joseph,
From my eperience with Penguin, it boils down to good quality on page SEO, as well as having high quality relevant backlinking. A lot of my copetitors sites dissapeared after the update, looking at there backlinks you can see why.
Well I know those ways but a great idea of creating e books is just amazing. thanks for letting us know. I just got a new gun to shoot out.
Thanks Joseph for such a good advice. I have been worrying about these updates for weeks.
Glad I could Help.
Thank you for the information on Mini eBooks including some site suggestions. I have not utilized them before.
Hi Karen, Utilise Them and let me know how it goes.
Hello Joseph, I have gone through your article and quite impressed with it. I only suggest one thing while doing blog commenting – don’t use any gimpy comments like “awesome post” / “thanks for sharing” / “nice blog” etc etc. These gimpy comments has been penalized by Google and counted as Spam. So while doing blog commenting – comment with some valuable tips related to the blog post. This will add more values to your back link. Anyways – loved your article – keep it up.
I appreciate some tips and ideas on how to escape google penguin update. Glad that I found somw recovery reviews.
I agree this is well said , blog commenting is a great way to get backlinks , and is probably one of the quickest ways. Social bookmarking is a good way to. Even sites like twitter , facebook and Google+ , are all good ones too. But yeah this is a good post and after penguin hit , You better be organic
You are right Zeeshan, The Penguin update targeted mostly on page over optimization, but it also targeted link schemes.
And i also think penguin update also effected on Keyword stuffing .
I don’t think blog commenting give you something because that is not a natural back-link from google perspective.
Blog commenting will give you a lot, and yes it is a form of natural back linking.
I think we must define what is ‘natural backlink’. If YOU place a link to YOUR website, that is not a natural backlink, in my opinion.
Nice so these the white hat techniques and dont forget linking to website like this haha
Problem about bllog commenting is abbysmal lack of approval…
I’ve tried to write some very long comments but anything rarely gets published, actually I’ll be surpirse if this does!
Hey Jeff,
I have had great success with blog commenting, the best way to do this is to read the post/article and drop a reasonable comment or contribution to the post and you will surely see your comment approved.
Informative Points. But, If you copy the content from other blogs and claim it as their own. also penalize by panda. so keep posting the fresh content for commenting and posting on other sites.
Hi
Nice Article! haha! Its really great.. but I had trouble reading your post. It would be great if you can remove this social sharing left-hand banner. Its really obstructing the post 
Hi Swayam, Thanks for the observation. am fixing it now.
a very smart idea to create an ebook to build backlink
thank you, really helped a newbie like me with an explanation of the above
Am glad I could help.
I am so disappointed because guest posting takes too much time and sometimes article is not approved by the owner.
Hi Vipin,
You should not be disappointed when your guest post get rejected. When your post is rejected, it is either you rewrite it and make it more appealing to the blogger or you take the article to another blogger that might love to publish it; at worst, you will publish the article on your blog thus creating more content page on your blog.
Thanks joseph,
my blog’s PR is 0, is there any other method to improve it except guest blogging?
Get Backlinks from forum and also do blog commenting.
ok thanks a lot joseph.
Hi, Joseph.
I went through your article. Its good, but still I have apprehension about blog commenting as most people are saying its not a natural way of back linking.
To me, I see blog commenting as a natural way of link building and it has been working for me in that manner. I will advice you to use it for building backlinks, it works well.
Sunny, I think there might be a difference between what you’ve heard and what Joseph is suggesting, in quality of blog comments.
In the past, some SEO types have spammed blogs with thousands of useless comments on a variety of blog posts. They will often insert totally unrelated (to the blog post) links with their chosen anchor text and automate this.
It is this type of blog commenting that is dangerous.
valuable information and i like the new and last tip as a web promotion technique, and i’m sure that they all are reallly important for SEO succes
For quite some time now I’ve used all sorts of SEO techniques but I have to say, the one that has the most potential power is a solid, completely original, well written and researched article.
I agree with many of the people who have commented already that good quality content is priceless and a well written article can be used firstly for a guest post then to an article repositary and also as an additional post on your own blog.
3 for the price of 1!
Relevancy matters a lot. Google give preferences to those links which are relevant and ignore all those that are not relevant and are created only for doing spamming in the results of SERP.
You are quite right Jennifer.
Great post Joseph! I’m going to check out the e-book post now and see what kind of ideas it gives me.
The ebook posts is great, make sure you check it and thanks for visiting.
Do you have an updated link to the Ultimate ebook Writing Guide? It’s a dead link
Oops! sorry, here it is- http://www.josylad.com/2012/10/writing-ebook-guide/ I will update the post now.
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for sharing this post. I’m relatively new to SEO and a series of sites were hit by Google’s recent algo updates.
I recently checked a series of oldish Ezine articles on Majestic SEO; While the articles are live, the back links appear to have disappeared. I wonder if this is because Ezine has ‘nofollow’ backlinks? If so, could you recommend other article submission sites?
Your ‘Mini Ebooks’ point intrigues me. Would it be advisable to pull together a handful of old blogposts into an Ebook and distribute? Or is unique content the way to go?
Thanks again, Joe.
Hi, Ezine articles is the best article directory I can recommend for you, though goarticles.com and freelibrary.com too is good, but Ezine articles is widely read and has higher value if you want to do article marketing.
About the eBook, you don’t need to start creating new content, just edit your old blog posts and make sure they are coherent and you are good to go.
good post, but can you brief more on blackhat seo and google punishment
Black hat SEO is mainly about trying to manipulate Search Engines results pages in an illegal way and I will advice you to stay away from such methods.
I’ve been submitting articles for each of my blog posts on my other site http://alicedymally.com I’ll be working on my first ebook soon. Thanks for suggesting fiverr for the cover. Will likely go that route. Great tips!
Hi Alice,
Fiverr is a great place am using these days, and there are lots of designers there. Make sure you give it a try and thanks for commenting.
Nice points with good amount of Explanation. Really helped me..Thanks…
I’m agree with you about 5 points above. Beside that, I always register my website to trusted web directory like Dmoz, Yahoodirectory and others directory that have high pagerank dan authority. Web directories that have high PR give one way backlink that can increase SERP fast.
Beside that, I always try to make great content to my visitor. Beside getting knowledge from my content, sometimes visitor giv organic backlink that can increase my SERP.
thanks Joseph for share this information
Never knew google index links inside pdf’s. Thank you fro putting this up, I’ll start composing that mini ebooks