Building backlinks is an essential, yet tedious job for most webmasters. Here are a few tools and tips to make that job just a little bit easier...

I am a member of many online forums. Most of these forums have to do with online marketing and site promotion. Recently, I came across a post on Ken Evoy's SBI forum that truly caught my attention.

It basically described how to use Google Alerts to build your backlinks. Now for those not familiar with Google Alerts a little explanation is probably needed.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free program run by Google that allows you to keep track of any topic on the web. You select your "keywords" or "urls" and Google will alert you via email whenever links/ content containing your selected topics appear anywhere on the web.

It is an excellent way to keep informed about your domain or name. It is also perfect for keeping up-to-date on the latest information in your market niche or niches. It's also a great way to find out what other people are saying about you or your site.

For example: if you have a site on "antique cars" then you would create a Google Alert for those keywords. Google will alert you by email whenever a new link/content related to those keywords appears on the web.

This is a great way to stay informed in your niche, but it is also a valuable source of potential linking partners. Many of those links are blogs that will allow comments with a link back to your site.

Google Alerts will probably send you 10-20 links each day, depending on the popularity of your chosen keywords. Just go to these blogs/links and see if you can leave a comment with some valuable additional information on what's been discussed.

Don't Spam

Please Note: Don't spam; there are intelligent people behind most of these blogs, and they will recognize keyword spam when they see it. Your main goal should be getting targeted traffíc back to your site and any link PR should be secondary. Always put the reader or viewer first, especially if it's on someone else's site. Don't talk about your site or your marketing - just join the conversation and add your comments/opinions/suggestions...

Enhance their site and they will reward you with traffic and a link. But you still have to keep your interests in the equation! You have to make sure you get your targeted keywords in the anchor text.

Keyword Market

First, if you've done your homework, your main keywords should already be in your domain name or url. Another way is to add your "keywords" + "guide" to your sig or signature. Such as: Name, Your Antique Cars Guide. If you're an expert in your particular niche, many webmasters will kindly welcome your comments and links.

Since your main goal is the traffic, many webmasters don't worry if there is a "no follow" attribute attached to the link. But if you are concerned about this - one way is to look at the source code to see if it has the "no follow" tag. I usually copy the whole source code of the page to my text editor and then do a simple "no follow" search.

No Follow

There is also a great little free comment tool called "Comment Kahuna" co-created by Jason Potash which will search blogs and tell you if they have the "no-follow" attribute or not, it will also give you the PageRank of each blog post. If you're going to use blogs as a source of your backlinks, I suggest you try Comment Kahuna - it will make the task much easier and it's free.

Actually, while the "no-follow" issue may be a concern for some webmasters, the savvy ones will realize these are links/sites Google is actively indexing and spidering, otherwise you wouldn't get the alert in the first place. You must get your links into this whole mix of related, relevant sites to help raise your rankings. Also remember the other search engines may not even consider the "no-follow" tag.

Trackbacks

Likewise, creating trackbacks are another way of linking relevant content. Keep in mind, a trackback is simply an acknowledgement via a ping signal that is sent from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor). Then the receptor often places a link back to Site A showing its worthiness.

Again, I am mainly concerned with the quality of the blog or link, rather than the linking structure. I want the targeted traffíc, and it doesn't really matter whether the link has "no follow" because interested visitors only see a link they can click for other helpful information.

Other Linking Options

Since we are on the topic of link building, another useful way to build backlinks is to use Google Search or Google Blog search. Now if you're looking for niche-related blogs just type in:

"(Keywords)" "powered by (blog scripts)"

For example, if you're looking for some "antique cars" related links on WordPress blogs, you would search for:

"antique cars" "powered by wordpress"

And Google would give you a whole líst of sites on antique cars.

Now if you want to find the links that will allow comments, just repeat the Google search with:

"antique cars" "powered by wordpress" "leave a comment" -"no comments"

Remember the "-" means posts that have no comments will not be displayed.

If you're concerned with PageRank, Number of Backlinks, Alexa Ranking... of particular posts you can download and install the SEOQuake plugin. This handy SEO plugin can be attached to your browser and will give you helpful SEO information on the link or links you're viewing.

Used in conjunction with Google, it can sort thru all these blog posts and give you the ones with the highest PR? Highest traffic? Highest number of backlinks? The more knowledge you have, the easier and more effective your link building will become.

Just remember, finding quality backlinks is probably the most tedious job for most webmasters. It takes time and it takes patience. By using Google Alerts you can have relevant keyword related links emailed to you each day. Use this information to help build your backlinks in relevant related niches. Do this consistently over a period of time and your site will get noticed and ranked higher.