With the demand for efficiency and economy becoming more prominent at present, link builders and website developers have discovered a strategy that combines the functionality of widgets with the purpose of link building.

Widgets Vis-à-vis Link Building

Widgets are simple applications that are embedded in websites to add visual appeal and serve a purpose or another. They can vary from simple games to weather forecasts to calculators. They can be simple buttons, drop-down lists, dialog boxes, selection boxes, menus with scroll bars, etc…

Backlinks to websites can be included in the widgets themselves. For example, you can include blog feeds from authority sites. This will also give you an opportunity to offer your widgets to related websites.

Unlike ordinary advertisements, widgets are more useful and are therefore several notches above the common website décor. Web masters will be more reluctant to let go of attractive and functional widgets. They therefore have higher chances of being retained in your partner websites than plain links.

Important Pointers When Using Widgets for Link Building

The first rule in using widgets for link building is to be straightforward about where the widget link is headed. Deceiving people will only backfire; web surfers hate it when links are not what they appear to be. People will eventually learn to avoid your widgets and not be bothered by irrelevant links.

Widgets inherently have simple codes, which is great since it will be quick to load and won’t affect the loading time of the web page where it is embedded. If you are creating your own widgets, bear this in mind. Another thing: use HTML or any other programming language that search engine bots can recognize and crawl.

There are services offered online dedicated to creating widgets. You may want to hire one if you intend to proceed with using widgets for link building. Having widgets custom-made will ensure that your widget is unique, has the right keywords and anchor text you need for effective linking, and possesses all the qualities appropriate for your website.

Submit your widgets to widget directories. People who are intentionally looking for widgets will have higher chances of finding yours than if they have to search for it through normal search engine inquiries.

Why Widgets?

Seeing as how widgets can effectively capture the attention of website visitors, why not use it for link building? This way you have a higher chance of drawing people’s attention to your backlinks. The visual appeal of widgets also serves as additional advertisement for your website.

What’s great about them is that you only have to copy their codes, paste them on the website, and voila! The widgets will be up and running right away.

You’ll know your widget campaign is successful when people can finally recognize its connection with your main website. For instance, the widgets for social networking sites and file sharing services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube are already so popular that all you have to do is display their respective logos and people will readily—even unconsciously, sometimes—click on them to utilize their links and functions.

When your widgets encourage the same action from website visitors, you will get higher traffic to your website with the possibility of decreasing bounce rates. Those who choose to click on your widgets are already apprised of what they can find in your main website—they may even be truly looking for what your services, products and website content are too.

So where do you start your geo-targeting endeavor for your link building campaign? It is actually best to begin locally. There is no need for you to revamp your campaign, however, as there are simple factors that you can do for geo-targeting as you build those links.

Anchor Text

Having geographically specific language on-site is crucial. Including large city names, physical address and state locations on-page is still relevant, but they actually matter to link building as well.

Although having an excellent geographical link label may give you a high rank at the SERPs, doing some off-site work may further increase your ranking status.

Thus, backlink link text is among the top factors considered in page ranking. It is especially used for major key phrases. Not only that, it likewise is used for getting top ranks in area-based queries.

Link Context

Aside from the anchor text, link context needs to be considered for link building. It involves less of link formatting or placement on a page, and more of the language surrounding it.

The topics and words on the linking page provide solid ideas on the site’s topic that is being linked to. Thus, it is advisable to use web pages focused on a particular place to your advantage.

Physical

If your website’s physical address is influential, the geographical relevance you will get through getting links to other sites with similar addresses is significant. The businesses near your area may not be directly associated with your company, but your local goals and their addresses are related.

Since you are not in competition with other businesses in your location, these addresses become more important to you. In fact, you can even create partnerships and beneficial agreements with such businesses.

Yet the best thing about this is that you can simply walk up to a business owner and talk with him in person. This is definitely better than ignored emails. Your physical presence is difficult to ignore.

Link building can be a struggle sometimes, but all the challenges you encounter are worth taking on. Before you know it, opportunities will come and once they do, there is significant value in ranking high in the SERPs for searches close to home.
 

-    Submitting Your Site to Authority Directories

Though there are plenty of directories, not all of them can give a good ROI. For directories, one should at least try to submit their links to big players like Yahoo!, Best of the Web, JoeAnt or Business.com. These directories have been proven to generate quality backlinks that actually help in the campaigns of their customers.

Directory submission can cost quite a lot. But once you get through, you can expect at least a respectable return on the money you spent. One thing to remember, directory submissions are not for websites that are still being constructed. Submitting an incomplete site is a sure way to get your application rejected.

Moreover, since getting listed is actually a privilege, you may not be able to refund the payment you made.

-    Actual Outreach Activities

This may not be a usual SEO strategy but it still is a legitimate avenue in establishing a connection with your customers. The only important thing here is how you will be able to translate your outreach into online customer traffic.

You can orchestrate outreach activities in many ways. The most common of these is through giveaways and/or promotional sample products. You can offer a free sample on your website just to entice some visitors in clicking through your online ads. You can also employ agents who will help promote your business by making phone calls and the like.

-    Web Content Publishing or Link Baiting

The most traditional way of building a link network is through web content publishing. Visitors click through a website maybe because it was first on the SERPs. What makes a website sit atop the rankings? Excellent Web content. Publishing quality web articles can be time consuming but it definitely is the surest way to life your website’s ranking and rep.

You can produce your own articles but for most companies, especially the bigger ones, hiring an external partner to produce the content may be the best way to go. This strategy is definitely more time and effort consuming but it is one of the most natural ways of acquiring backlinks.

You can use other tools though as link baits aside from web articles. You can use viral videos, graphs, photos, comic strips, and many more. You can post ads of your company in reputable and high-traffic websites.

-    Link Buying

Though a very common practice nowadays, link buying is a link building strategy that has been discouraged. However, many companies, especially some start-up ones, that turn to paid links just so they can jumpstart their link building campaigns.

Several businesses online offer their services for a fee and guarantee a certain number of backlinks back to their customers’ sites. The downside of this strategy mainly comes from the fact that you never really know where the links are coming from or if they are even relevant to your site.

Some of these paid link companies even give out spam links. These will definitely not help your campaigns. This dangerous possibility is the prime reason why this strategy is inherently flawed. You are better off sticking to strategies that will get you quality links in a natural way.

Link building requires time and effort. Do not hesitate to invest your time and a little bit of your funds to your campaign. The returns of your effort may dwarf everything that you spent to make it happen.
 

The SEO industry is no different from any business: quality is still the main focus rather than quantity. Search engines put emphasis on the quality of the links that on your site rather than sheer volume. If you can strike both quantity and quality links at the same time then link building will be a breeze for you.

If you do not know what to be wary about, there are plenty of potholes your link building campaign could be mired in. Here are some of the common ones:

-    Buying or selling links

Some people have already made legitimate businesses out of buying and selling links to people. However, most search engines (especially Google) frown upon this trade and consider this an easy way out of the whole link building process.

Many of these link-selling businesses advertise that their service will only be costing a very affordable price while helping your website achieve higher ranks in the SERPs. Most of these sites are fraudulent. Yes, they do offer a certain quantity of links to your site but sometimes most of them are from sites with bad reputation, which can impact your site in a negative way. Your website can even get banned by search engines in the process.

-    Getting links from sites with bad reputation

In the process of link building, this is just as bad as paying for your links. As a rule, never link to disreputable websites. The link building process is like a popularity contest: the more websites link back to you, the better as it means more sites are considering you as an authority. However, if the majority of those voting for you are unpopular themselves then the volume of “votes” you got is irrelevant.

You want to make sure that your website has links to—and from—websites that are also authority in the eyes of search engines. In this way, web crawlers can at least get the hint that your site has quality content since it keeps the company of sites with good reps.

-    Linking to sites with low PageRanks

Similar to linking with websites with bad reputation, low Page Rank sites have the tendency to pull you down in the search engine rankings instead of pulling you up. In the process of link building, it is better to get links from sites that have pageranks equal to that of your website’s.

The progress that your website makes is dependent on the links it contains. Also, outbound links—provided they are relevant to your content—are good too; the more you link to sites that have higher PageRank, the better for your campaign.

-    No Follow linking

No Follow Links can be used in order for your website to avoid being linked by disreputable sites. They can also generate traffic for your website. However, in terms of search engine rankings, No Follow links are irrelevant. Inbound links are important where SERPs are concerned but ones with the No Follow attribute are worthless.

-    Linking to sites that are not in your niche

Aside from Page Rank and link authority, niche relevance is also one thing you should consider. Backlinks are relevant if they talk about the same topics as your site does and are something that your visitors will deem relevant. Search engines are rather meticulous about this so it is very important for your link building endeavor.

-    Spam links

Commenting on various websites is one way of getting quality links. More often that not however, experienced webmasters delete comments they deem as superfluous; they know search engines sometimes consider unnecessary comments as spam.

Though it is unlikely that spam links will affect your overall page rankings, it is relatively ineffective and a waste of time.

-    Not getting your keywords as anchor text

Anchor text plays a critical component in the whole SEO process. You should always try to insert your keywords into the anchor text of each link that points back to your site. When negotiating with other webmasters, indicate what anchor text you want to have in the backlinks. Choose the best keywords.

Any serious webmaster need to pay serious attention to the link building process if they are to achieve success in the SEO sphere. The whole thing requires diligence, patience, and wit in order to strategically place your site and increase its chances at ranking high in SERPs. Like any businesses, success in the SEO field will depend on how much time and effort you are willing to invest in this important aspect of the game.
 

External Backlinks
Search engine algorithm identifies the value of links to determine the popularity, importance and relevance of a web page. Search engines like Google classify links into two categories: internal and external links. When it comes to the value between these two links, Google puts more weight and consideration to external links than internal links. Although internal links are still important, Google carries out the principle that what others say or think about you is more significant than what you say about yourself. But this doesn’t entail that you can ignore having good internal link structure or disregard improving on your internal links.

Advantages of Backlinks
Definitely, a direct advantage for having a huge number of external incoming links pointing to your site is that the more sites linking to your pages, the more online traffic your site will get and the wider the target audience your site attracts. Link building would be even more effective if backlinks are located in sites that attract high traffic themselves, have high quality content, and are within your industry or niche.

Another advantage of having a high level of backlinks, albeit less noticeable, is that it makes your site more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines. Search engine algorithms regard inbound links as votes of confidence. This means racking up more links increases the level of trust and power behind your site. Trust is an essential force behind any website’s successful search marketing efforts. Building trust with search engines is very important if you are competing for rankings and establishing dominant online presence in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. However, you can only accomplish this if you carefully select the right kind of quality links.

The Right Kind of Links
Always remember that a search engine’s algorithm can discriminate among the links leading to your site. There are good quality links that can greatly contribute to your link building efforts, and there are also bad ones. To become effective in driving more traffic to your site, you have to discern which backlinks can give your site the leverage to rank better in search engines. So how do you determine which links are worth pursing? How can you judge the value of a link?

Link Popularity, Relevance, and Trust
Having valuable backlinks helps your search engine optimization process to progress smoothly because it provides your site the sure-fire path to better ranking opportunities in search engine results pages. A valuable backlink that helps your site climb the SERPs must have high quality. Moreover, gathering high quality links will depend on the level of trust and relevance of the web sites they are found and on the popularity of your links.

Search engines have just recently placed more significance on metrics about an entire domain rather than an individual URL or page, making it now possible for new pages or even sites with very few links to rank highly because they are connected with important, trusted and well-linked-to domains. Based from this, you can see how being linked with certain domains will surely propel you own site to higher rankings. Having backlinks from other domains that have high levels of authority and trust signals search engines that your site is considered a potentially important resource of those trusted sites. Your site will be seen as valuable if your site have links from other valuable sites. Also, attracting links from websites that have content relevant to yours cues search engines to consider your site an influence within your niche or industry, pushing you further to higher rankings.

Link popularity also plays a vital role in boosting your rankings. Basically, if the links to your pages are considered popular and attract a lot of clicks, it also means that your site is considered popular and important by search engines

Anchor Text Relevance
As mentioned earlier, when looking for sites that will link to yours, it is always important to check their relevance to your content. Make sure that the page that links to your site is relevant to the page within your site that you want to link it to. See to it if the other page’s content is related to the keywords in your own target page, especially if that other page uses related keywords in locations that Google finds important. Check for keywords in the following locations of the page that can be accessed through the View Source command: domain and URL, title tag, heading tags, the body of the text and HTML, and the incoming links pointing to the page itself.

Your goal is to check if the page can be considered as relevant by search engine and if it also related to your own page. The relevance of the anchor text is one of the most important elements in determining rankings. As an attribute of links, anchor text is a critical metric that passes ranking value to a page. Furthermore, search engines give more ranking value that can be passed to “exact match” anchor texts rather than target keywords that are just inserted in an anchor text phrase. For instance, if your page contains a comprehensive article on how to maintain cars, and you are planning to get inbound links from a web site selling car care products, you need to check if the page has exact related anchor texts such as “car maintenance,” “maintaining your car,” etc., rather than “These cheap car care products will help maintain your car well.”

Link Juice, Link Equity, and PageRank
In your link building efforts, it is also important to look at link equity and link authority or “link juice.” Link equity is a component of PageRank, which is an important part of off-page search engine optimization. Link equity refers to the number of incoming links to any given page on your web site. On the other hand, link juice or link authority is the underlying value of the links. This is also referred to as domain authority, which describes the measure of importance, popularity, and trustworthiness of any page in a given domain by the search engines. Google considers the domain where you earn your links from as important as the individual metrics of the page passing the link.

These two combined influence PageRank, which is not directly related to how high you’ll rank in search engines. PageRank is a measure of a website’s popularity on a scale of 1 to 10, with PR 10 being the highest. PageRank functions under the principle that a link pointing to a web site is considered as vote or endorsement for that site. The more votes your site gets, especially from sites that have high PageRanks themselves, the higher your PageRank and popularity. To determine the PageRank value that is being passed, you have to identify the innate PageRank value of a page and the number of links on a page. If a page has a PageRank of 8 it can pass on and link out to two other pages, those pages will carry PR4 each. Thus, the more links on a page, the lower the PageRank value it can pass on.

Therefore, to make your site popular, you need to earn as much links as possible from other web sites that have substantial link authority, with sizeable inherent PageRank value, and have pages with less links to maximize the level of popularity and trust your site can gain.

Permanence
It goes without saying that the permanence and sustainability of links also play key roles to your search engine optimization process. Link building is not just a matter of immediate boosts in your page attributes or site popularity; it should also be in line with the long-term sustainability of these effects. The quality of the site where your links are earned from should not only be the focus, but also consider if those links will stay there for a long time. Once your links are gone, the effects are gone as well. It is important to pursue links from a site that’s just longer periods of time as the site and link mature.

Also, try to avoid buying links most of the time since you can only buy them out for a definite period of time. It won’t be worth it since you will just spend more money to renew and maintain your links on a site.

Link Positioning
Links can appear in different locations on a page; it can be on the header, footer, sidebars or in the body of the content itself. However, when search engines analyze a page for different sections, they assign different weights to content or links according to their location. In general, links placed at the top or beginning of the page are deemed more valuable by search engines than links on the footer of the page. Moreover, links that are occur naturally within the main content of the page carries higher value than any location. This means that links placed in articles as anchor texts that lead to your page have more weight than links placed at the end of a featured content. Thus, it is important to place your links at the top/ navigation header of the page or within a paragraph of the main content as much as possible.

Other Link Evaluation Factors to Consider
Finally, you should also take into account the cost of acquiring a link and the probability of acquiring a link. Issues like how much time and effort do you need to spend to earn a certain link must be thought through to become more effective and efficient in your SEO efforts. You should ask yourself: Is it worth it?

Also, you need to be realistic about the likelihood of acquiring a link from a web site. There are other factors that influence the possibility of actually earning a link. Do you have what it takes to earn a certain link? Can you add a link directly or submit it without strings attached? Can you easily make revisions or additions to a linking page? Also, do you have an existing relationship with the owner or webmaster of a certain domain? If you do, it would help a lot.

• What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or URL. They are often used interchangeably with inbound links, incoming links, inward links, and inlinks. In the world of SEO, backlinks, like PageRank, are an indicator of link popularity or importance of a particular web page. The weight that search engines like Google ascribe to quality backlinks when calculating SERP have made backlinks a building block for excellent SEO. Search engines consider pages with a substantial number of quality backlinks more relevant or more important than others when coming up with SERP. Link building is a vital tool that gives Internet businesses direct traffic, better position in the search engine rankings, and more profits. For any link building campaign to prevail and reap these benefits, webmasters or site owners need not rely on merely the quantity of backlinks pointing to their site, but the quality of backlinks as well. The usage of proper search engine optimization techniques and link building methods should take these facts into consideration.

• Quality Matters.

In getting inbound links for link popularity, quality matters. Search engines like Google compute the relevancy of a site based on the importance or relevancy of the backlinks pointing to that site. It is not enough to get as many inbound links as possible; we need to look at the quality of these backlinks. Quality is usually determined by the content of a specific site. When backlinks to your site come from other sites that have related content to your site, these backlinks are judged as relevant by the search engines. However, if these backlinks are from sites with unrelated content, search engines consider them less relevant. The more relevant the backlinks are to your site, the greater their quality. Moreover, there are several factors that influence a backlink’s value. When backlinks come from “high authority” sites, they are highly valuable.

• Importance of Anchor Text

One thing you need to consider in back link building is the anchor text of your backlinks. An anchor text is a description of the inbound link and must contain useful information relevant to the content on the linked page. There are tools like search engine bots that evaluates the relevancy of an anchor text to the content of a given web site. The bottom line is for the anchor text and content to be highly congruent. This will ensure that your web page becomes highly weighted in the SERP rankings based on a given keyword query.

• PageRank and Backlinks

Backlinks are important when we deal with how to increase our performance in Google PageRank. SEOWatch conducted a study to determine exactly how important backlinks are when computing PageRank. They conclude that 67% of PageRank depends on backlinks. This tells us that serious link building efforts require a lot of investment in order to enhance the quantity as well as quality of backlinks to a website. There are several techniques in building backlinks – some are considered ethical, and some unethical.

• Get Them Naturally.

When we say ethical methods in link building, we mean that the link acquisitions are made naturally. Increasing awareness on how search engines operate has resulted to the increasing use of sneaky and manipulative designs by webmasters in order to influence their placements in the search engine rankings. Since search engine algorithms are designed to assign rankings in a democratic manner, tougher measures and quality requirements have been imposed to prevent other webmasters from using unethical methods to gain undue advantage over others. Using sneaky devices like link farms do not only get you penalized, they might get you banned entirely. Search engines look for natural inbound links, which are links that are built slowly over time. There are several techniques to build natural links. Link baiting and using high quality content in order to attract natural links your way are among the most effective ways to improve a site’s link popularity. Site owners can develop natural links by themselves or can hire a link building company to do it for them.

• Backlink Building Don’ts

There are several link building practices to avoid.

1. Link exchange. One of the don’ts in link building is link exchange. This operates as a barter exchange of links. If you put a link to their site, they put a backlink to your site. When involved in link exchanges, you must be wary of the ratio of your outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links outnumber your inbound links, this is a negative sign. Moreover, you must ensure that your link exchange partners are not link farms; if so, you may put your site at risk of being banned from search engines.
2. Suspicious links. Never link to suspicious sites. While search engines do not penalize you for having backlinks from such sites, engaging in a link exchange program with so-called “bad neighborhood” sites would destroy your link building efforts.
3. Acquiring quality backlinks are an important factor to consider in any link building campaign geared at improving search engine rankings and enhancing link popularity. However, it takes more than just backlinks to drive traffic to your site and influence your rankings. The most important thing is to develop a website with high quality content that is useful and relevant to the end user experience.

If you pursue high quality link building using other methods and increase inflow of backlinks by submitting your URL effectively to Internet directories, the greater your change in breezing ahead of your competitors. The successful use of directory submission to boost link popularity and rankings depends on the number and quality of directories you submit your website to. The importance of “quality” in directory submissions, as in other link building methods cannot be overemphasized. Algorithms in Google and other major search engines favor sites listed in high quality directories.

Are Free Directories Worth It? There are thousands of possible directories that you could submit your website to for your link building campaign, but screening out thousands into a group of high quality directories will take time. When time is an issue for you, you can hire a link building company to handle directory submissions for you. High authority directories are the most popular go-to directories for site owners who are gunning for top spots in the SERP rankings. An important option you need to consider if you intend to submit a URL to an Internet directory for enhanced link popularity is The Open Directory Project at DMOZ.org. The Open Directory Project feeds content to search engines like Google, Lycos, Hotbot, AOL Search, Ask Jeeves and Netscape, among others.

Listing your site at DMOZ is helpful to your link building campaign since this allows your information to be found on several smaller search engines and directories on the Web. Moreover, DMOZ is considered to be among the free higher authority directories that are guaranteed to build link popularity. The downside with DMOZ however, is that its free listing feature subjects sites to very strict quality control procedures before submissions are accepted. Hence, acceptance is not easy and turnaround takes a considerable amount of time. Despite this, site owners must consider submitting to DMOZ and other free quality directories for link building. They must also submit to paid directories listings for site inclusion.

Paid Directories Why do you need to pay fees to be included in the directory listing? According to Matt Cutts of Google, the purpose of the fee in a high quality directory is to compensate the time and effort of someone (an editor) doing a genuine evaluation of a URL or site. There have been concerns that Google’s rejection policy of URLs with paid links would render listing into paid directories useless in link building efforts, but Cutts has explained it clearly that Google does not penalize directories requiring minimum fees for editorial reviews. What Google blacklists are directories that sell links for link juice, passing PR and purely for profit with no regard for the end user. If used effectively, directory submissions as a link building method guarantees a high return on investment (ROI).

By increasing the number of backlinks to your site, directory submissions help you gain link popularity and a better placement on the SERP rankings. Directory submissions are a long-term advertising technique that can directly send customers at your doorstep. Since it acts like an online phonebook of sites, having your site listed in many quality directories means a greater likelihood for prospective customers to view your site and obtain contact information. In the group of paid Internet directories, there are major differences in payment options. Some charge a lifetime or one-time fee and others charge an annual or recurring fee. Depending on your ROI goals, you need to evaluate the payment guidelines and review payment options before selecting the directory to submit to. Here are definitions to guide you:

1. Paid web directories. These are Internet directories that charge site owners a fee for their site inclusion on the directory. They are also called premium, commercial, or pay-for directory listings. Among the high authority paid directories include Yahoo! Directory, Skaffe, Joeant, Abilogic, eLib, and BOTW Directory.
2. Annual fee web directories are directories that charge site owners an annual fee to get listed on the directory. They are also referred to as recurring fee, recurring membership listings, or recurring fees.
3. Permanent fee web directories require a one-time charge for directory listings. This means that you pay a lifetime fee for site inclusion.

There is some debate on which payment option is best. Some prefer the permanent fee listings since it is more economical, but others question the quality of services in one-time listings. Recurring or annual fees are usually paid in order to maintain directories. As submissions increase, the larger the directories become, so Internet directories deem it fitting to charge site owners to maintain the directories and pay for editorial costs to ensure effective and sustained indexing for Google rankings. The choice is entirely left on the discretion of the site owner. A rule of thumb: do not pay too much for submission to paid directories. Submit to free directories and suggest your site only to high quality paid directories that guarantee ROI.

Blogging works this way: you share your knowledge on a preferred niche or topic and readers can send you feedbacks through comments. Since content is something very valuable in the eyes of the search engine, high quality content and sound link building methods can propel your blog to the top of the rankings. Your blog’s popularity can be gauged by examining the number of subscribers on your RSS feed and the frequency of exchanges and comments that occur between you and your readers. You can hire a link building company to increase your blog’s rankings. There are several firms that offer professional link building services to assist you. However, there are also useful do-it-yourself tips to maximize your blog’s link popularity.

Below are a few tips on how to acquire free links that can help catapult your blog’s rankings to the top spot.

1. Add your URL to major search engine directories. Essentially, this means Google, Yahoo, and MSN. All you have to do is visit Google Webmaster tools, login, add your site, and make sure to verify it. After verification, it takes about a week for Google to crawl your site. As for Yahoo, aside from adding your site, you will also need to authenticate it. Authentication takes around one or two days and it will entail about a week for Yahoo to crawl your web site. The same goes for MSN. Go to MSN Webmaster, login, add your site and upload the XML file provided to you by MSN on your site for verification.
2. Submit your URL to directory listings. Submitting your site to web directories will help you get free back links that will increase your search engine ranking. The trick is to choose the best free web directories to submit your URL to. Identify all possible web directories for submission but be picky. Search engines are rumored to blacklist some directory submissions for abusive behavior so it is best to do a little research on prospective web directories. Go to the site of each listed directory and review their submission rules and privacy guidelines. Avoid a directory submission service because you might not have control on the submission, you face the threat of being labeled a spammer, or your blog or site could get blacklisted.
3. Do some link swapping. Link swapping is a great way to build link popularity since it allows you to connect with the community of bloggers. It enables you to trade links with bloggers who share similar interests with you. In the end, link swapping generates more readership, more traffic, and consequently, link popularity to your site. Examples of sites that facilitate link swapping among bloggers are BlogLinker and Link2Blogs.
4. Button exchanges. A button exchange is a network where member sites display button ads and getting ads in return, which are displayed on other web sites. All you have to do is submit an 88 x 31 button and put the network’s code on your web site. In doing so, other participating sites will display your 88 x 31 button on their sites. This could hopefully increase your chance of getting people to click your site once they see your button, generate traffic, and build link popularity.
5. Traffic exchanges. A traffic exchange is a service where you can sign up to generate traffic to your blog or site and boost link popularity. It works like this: you get to view other people’s web pages in exchange for having your own pages viewed by others. If you view another member’s web page for a certain period of time, your credit balance increases. If a member views your web page for the same amount of time, your credit balance increases. Consequently, the more you surf the Internet and view other people’s web pages, the greater your chances of your site getting more hits and views, increasing link popularity. There are two types of traffic exchanges – manual and auto. A manual exchange involves a human being viewing web pages, whereas an auto exchange can run in your web browser and automatically refresh to a new web page.

When trying out these tips, always bear in mind that link building is a process that will necessarily take time. Therefore, patience is a virtue when it comes to building link popularity. In addition to the advice mentioned above, you should always educate yourself on the newest and most effective link building methods that you could use in order to get your blog noticed on the Internet.