Yes! Back links are still one of the most coveted items for webmasters who are into SEO and there are good reasons for it. Besides Google's urdent effort to crush down on link sales, buying links is often not a feasible option for small webmasters.Under such situation most webmasters would often resort to link exchange or spamming blog and guest books. But they are to no good ! So what other ways can a website get back links and that too for free?



There are actually more than one ways to get good quality free back links to your website.

a) Directory Submission : Submit your website to good quality directories. There are plenty of directories that are free yet useful. Try to make a list of them and submit to them in accordance to their T & C. Most directories would approve your listin if you follow their guidelines properly and you end up with a bunch of good free backlinks. To check for a good quality directory, remeber the following:

A good directory would never ask for a link back

Try to find how old the directory is -- the older the better

Check the number of sites already submitted - the more the number of sites the better it is

Check if the site links to websites that are potetial bad neighborhoods.

b) Blog & Social Media: Create a blog of your own. Believe me it is far better than spamming other's blogs :D In almost all SEO related websites it i preached that content is the key to success because search engines love content and good contents gain links. What better way would you have to present your good content to potential linkers than postin it in your blog? It is important that you create a blog as a part of your domain, i.e, if your domain is http://www.example.com/, you can have a blog as http://www.example.com/blog . This helps to transfer the power of the free back links that you get in your blog to the main domain also.

Create good content on your blog and submit them to the social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit etc. If your content is really good, you are sure to get a host of Free back links. ( this reminds me, probably I should make my next post on what is "Good content").

c)RSS Feeds: Generate a RSS feed and submit it to the RSS directories. On the Internet people are hungry for content, there might be a bunch of people waiting to put your RSS on their website and thus provide you with a bunch of free backlinks.

d) Submitting articles in an articles directory is very important for your online business. It gives you free targeted traffic as your authors bio is also attached with the article which contains the back links to your websites, when visitors read articles then they also visit your site and here they can be your free customer of the products you are selling. This also gives you the free backlinks, as search engines gives importance to these backlinks to any site and this contributes making your site's rank increase and making it important for search engines.

e) Press Release: We all know what press releases are meant for but an advantage that we should not overlook is that a press release would always contain a link back to the website. So a well circulated press release is equals to a bunch of Free back links.

f) Website Review: There are various websites and forums that conducts review of website/product/services. Submit your website to these and with each review you are sure to get atleast one free back link. ( Drawback: if your product/service quality is bad you might get some negative review which in turn can affect your business)

g)Freebies: For those webmasters who can afford or are technically very strong; offer free widgets, templates and other freebies that people can use on their website and blogs and ask them for a link in return. Most of them would happily link back to your website for a good free wordpress template or a fancy widget.