Building The Direct Layer In Your Backlinking Strategy
The second step in your backlinking strategy (after having good content to link to) is to build a direct layer of backlinks. This direct layer is made up of anchor text backlinks from established web properties like article directories, blogging platforms, web 2.0 properties, and blog commenting.
Submitting to EzineArticles is going to be your first move at this point in your backlinking strategy. You should have at least 5 or 6 original, quality articles all ready to submit to EzineArticles. Ezine has a pretty strict approval process and if you’re using spun articles, you may not get them approved.
While the articles going to EzineArticles have to be original (more on that in a bit), and they should be relevant also, you don’t have to worry about these articles ranking for your keywords. In fact, you don’t want these articles to directly compete with your primary site. The only thing that you are interested in is the targeted keyword anchor text link that you’ll put in the resource box at the end of the article.
I generally submit to EzineArticles on successive days. Usually they are pretty consistent with the amount of time it takes to approve an article (I’m a platinum member). I want the backlinks dripped into the system rather than showing up all at once. Yeah, I know that adding a few articles to one directory at the same time won’t get me banned by Google, it’s just my habit.
Keep Your Backlinking Strategy Google Friendly
While they don’t come right out and say it, Google does make it clear that they do watch the rate of backlinks appearing as an indicator of whether the website is legit or not. Download their SEO starter guide (pg.28) and get more information.
If you are new to publishing on EzineArticles you haven’t been through their whole process of approval yet. The reason that this particular article directory still holds a lot of weight is because they have a good manual review process of the articles submitted.
If you haven’t used them before, it will probably take about 5-7 days for one of your articles to be approved by them. This is because they have people who actually check your article copy against what’s out there on the web already.
As I said before, and it’s worth repeating, if your article is not original enough, it may not be approved and they will ask you to re-write it. Then the whole approval process starts again. This is why its best to submit original articles that you have written yourself right at first.
There is also an upside to their approval process. Once you have a certain number of articles published, I think it’s 10, and you’ve proven yourself to be a provider of good and quality content, you are bumped up to platinum level and it takes only a couple of days for your articles to get approved.
Now, about your “resource box”. This is where your backlinks will appear. You are allowed 2 backlinks in this area that appears at the bottom of the article. The most widely used practice is to use anchor text as one link and then the root URL to your site as the other.
A typical resource box may look like this:
This article was written by Joe Blow who loves “KEYWORD #1″. He has a master’s degree in blah, blah, loves hunting and fishing. You can see more at his website http://www.joeblow..com
Although you can have static resource boxes for every article you write it’s better if you tweak the URL link to your anchor text with each article. This will help your backlinking strategy by spreading them over your whole site and not just one or two pages.
After you have your articles written and published on EzineArticles, it’s time to move onto publishing them on other platforms and article directories. You will still want them to appear unique, but, you don’t have to re-write the whole article.
Expanding Your Backlinking Strategy
If you don’t have access to a paid article spinner, there are several free spinners available on the web. Simply-Free-Article-Spinner.com and FreeArticleSpinner.com are just two that are available.
Now, while you don’t have to use a paid tool to do this, if you want to make a good investment, The Best Spinner is probably the most complete article spinning tool that is on the market today. It can save a lot of time and produce good content, but, it may not be what you need right now.
At this point, it’s probably a good idea to start experimenting and getting comfortable with spinning articles. Sometimes, with different software, the “spinning syntax” is a little different. This is because each spinner may not use the same characters as another and it may get confusing if you’re not that familiar with it.
So, go get familiar with theses tools as soon as possible. You’ll want to have all the spun articles ready to submit to the other directories and blogging platforms in one setting. Once you have these in place you’ll be finished with building the direct layer of this particular backlinking strategy.
Get More About Building Backlinks
- Backlinking Strategy Step 2
- How To Build Backlinks Free | The Backlink Strategy That Works
- Backlinking Strategy Step 3 pt.2
Get Backlinks Recommends
- “The War On Internet Marketing” (Chad Nicely)
- SEO Course: Backlinking Your Way To The Top (Backlinks4SEO)
