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Successful Link Building Tactics That Won't Get Your Site Banned

When it comes to link building, caution is the watch word that will gain your website pagerank without getting your site either banned or sent into the oblivion of search engine results. There are a number of good methods for getting backlinks to your website and increasing traffic. There are also a number of methods that will not only destroy your credibility but don't work either.

Reciprocal linking has been long held up as a viable method to get links to your website. Up until a couple of years ago, that was true and there were many methods and software created to build a themed niche directory on our website and contact other websites that were in your general niche. Whether manually or via a software intervention, you ask other webmasters for a "reciprocal link" on their website and place one on your site. Unfortunately, this practice was so abused it finally went belly up and is now not only useless, but it can get lower ratings for your website unless you are very, very careful.

Reciprocal links works when you have an extremely tight niche and you trade only with other sites that are directly aligned with what your niche is about. In most cases, in order to accomplish this, you must give up volumes of links for a few links that are directly related to what your website is about. Having 5 to 10 reciprocal links won't kill your pagerank, but it won't send volumes of visitors to your website either.

Enter the Backlink

The backlink is a one-way link from other websites to your site. They are also referred to as inbound links, and they are ranked very highly by the search engines with one caveat. If you have a ton of incoming links from junk sites, you will not only torpedo your pagerank, but you will loose all of your credibility in the process. So, while getting backlinks is important, you must pick and choose who is linking in. If, for example, you have a site about iPhones, getting backlinks from pet food sites will do nothing to build your pagerank.

Directories Are Not All Created Equal

Getting backlinks from directories is another popular way to get backlinks to your site. You will see advertising where people will post your website to 6000 directories for X price. Don't fall for it. Out of those 6000 directories, only a few are worth anything to you and you will wind up looking like you are spamming the universe and wasting your money at the same time. All those junk directories will only bring down your site credibility and do you a disservice in the end. Certain directories are trusted, authority directories while others are simply junk or what is called bad neighborhoods to visit. And, we all know what happens if your site wanders into a bad neighborhood of junk directories -- it gets mugged and there goes all your hard work. Beyond Google, which everybody knows they need to be listed in, the top search engines and directories to work on include the following:

Directories and Search Engines to get listed in include:
- Yahoo(Express fee or long wait)
- DMOZ(takes up to 1 year)
- Best of the Web which has a fee.
- Seoma Registration fee
- Clickey
- Exact Seek Top 10 rating comes with a fee
- What You Seek Submission fee and eight week wait
- Really First One of the larger directories with over 40,000 links. Lousy navigation but it's also free.

Noteworthy Additions to the Search Engine Arena

All The Web - This is the search engine version of Yahoo. It was originally owned by Overture, but was subsequently purchased by Yahoo. It bears a slight resemblance to Google in its spartan look, but it has excellent video and photo searching features as well as a clean, swift interface. Its biggest drawback is that it hasn't been marketed very well so many people don't even realize it exists.

Not to be forgotten in this plethora of search engines and directories is MSN, This is a fully functional consumer portal that isn't used all that much. Its searches are growing primarily due to the backing of Microsoft, and it has the advantage of being integrated into the IE browser toolbar interface. It has good feeds integration and the shopping links are considered better than those delivered by other search engines.

While this is not the entire list of directories, it goes way beyond the standard search engine submissions. You will also need to do some research in order to find niche specific directories.

We know that getting backlinks to your site is the major goal of effective marketing, and we've explored different methods that either worked in the past or were so shoddy they never worked. Something that has always worked and worked well is the use of article marketing.

Article Marketing and Backlinks to Your Website

If you submit articles to article directories, you will build a wealth of organic traffic and major credibility to and for your website. Marketing by writing articles about your niche is one of the easiest, cheapest methods for building backlinks from major authority websites that have high pagerank.

If, for instance, you have a website that's about children's books, writing reviews of upcoming releases of children's books is a great way to promote both your website and build interest and ultimately sales about specific books that children will love. Using the Authors or Resource Box at the end, you can add a link or backlink to your website that a person will read after reading your article. There are a ton of article directories where you can submit your article; however, there are some things to consider prior to submitting.

You need to write or rewrite an original article for each and every article directory. With that said there are seven major article directories that you should always submit and rewrite and submit your articles to:

- Ezine Articles PR6
- Article Dashboard PR6
- GoArticles PR4
- IdeaMarketers PR6
- Unarchived Articles PR5
- ArticleCity PR6
- Marketing Seek PR5
- A1-Optimization PR5
- Article Crazy PR2
- ArticleBiz - PR6

These are ranked in terms of the following:

* Approval times
* Article views
* Traffic response
* Page ranking

Most of the other directories will send you little to no traffic, having varying levels of pagerank and credibility.

Web 2.0 Social Networking

After article marketing, the new backlink generator that works extremely well is social networking, social news and social bookmarking. On sites like Digg, Newsvine and the like you create the news and buzz about your website and other sites that interest you. As you post your information, you go to these types of sites and inform the world that you have updated your site with interesting information.

Social bookmarking is more about sites that bookmark and make available to the world the URL of websites that have updated and have something interesting to say. These types of sites include Reddit, Lipstick, Mr. Wong, and Ning to name a few. These sites bookmark your content and present small snippets of information in the form of a clickable link that will take you to the site in question.

Social networking sites include Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, Buzznet, Blip, Yahoo Groups, Six Apart and Xanga. These sites are more community-oriented rather than news reporting. While news and information is exchanged, you will find these sites feel more like large community centers where people are chatting and exchanging views.

About the Author

Randy Zlobec a search engine marketing specialist, real estate seo expert, and author of search engine marketing book Sem Gorilla http://www.semgorilla.com

Author Profile: semgorilla1

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