I am assuming that you are aware that back linking involves leaving a link on a website which links back to a specific page within your own website. The link which you leave on the site will then be crawled by the Google “bots” next time the website is crawled, and Google will recognise the link as a back link to your site/page. This link will quite often be attached to some text like this: Free 360 – which is known as the anchor text for that link. Building links like this helps you rank better for that chosen keyword which you have used as you anchor text, in this case it would help Gratis Gadgets rank better for the term “Free 360” once several of those links have been built.

So how do you build back links?

Well, there are several ways in which you can go about link building including Article submissions, forums signatures, blog posts and leaving links in website profiles.
As this is a beginner’s guide I am simply going to stick to the simplest methods which are commenting on blogs and using forum signatures. This method involves leaving links on sites with similar content and niches to yours. In my case I am currently trying to build links for my Free Xbox 360 page so I need to find sites related to this topic e.g. Xbox 360 forums, games console blogs, or any blog/forum with console related content.

Here’s how to build links from blog comments:

Ok, so the first step is to find some blogs with similar niches to yours which also have “dofollow” tags in place (meaning Google will follow the link back to your site once it has been crawled, rather than “nofollow” which means the links won’t be traced back to your site, meaning the link is useless). A nice piece of free software which I found works well for this is Fast Blog Finder, which can be downloaded for free here.

Using this software you can type in keywords related to your site e.g. Xbox 360, games consoles, freebies, Xbox games etc. etc. and the software will compile a list of 50 blogs matching those terms. What you then need to do is sort the list by blog type. This will then group together the sites which are all “dofollow” and “nofollow”. What I suggest you do then is open up a web browser and simply copy and paste the url of the blogs which are dofollow in to your browser and find the site that way.

Once on the blog you need to leave a link. Firstly, find a post or topic which you can leave a relevant comment about (no spam or it won’t be approved). Once you have done this you will be given a comment box and a few fields which need filling in which will look something like this:

Name:
Website/Url:
Email:
Comment:

What we need to do here is to try and leave a link back to our site with the chosen anchor text “Free 360”.
To do this we would need to fill out the comment form in the following way –

Name: Free 360
Website/Url: www.gratisgadgets.co.uk
Email: (use your real email address)
Comment: (enter a relevant comment which is likely to be approved).

By putting your keyword in the “Name” field rather than your actual name will create a link with your chosen anchor text rather than it being attached to something unrelated like Bob. This in turn can help your site in 2 ways. Firstly, your site gains a back link from a relevant site with a similar niche to yours. Secondly, that link also has a keyword rich anchor text, thus helping you rank better for that term in the Google rankings.

In my example, once my comment has been posted/approved it would appear under the name Free 360 with a link back to my site attached to that anchor text, thus earning Gratis Gadgets a Free 360 back link. You then need to repeat this process with as many different dofollow blogs as you can find, but I would recommend leaving no more than 5 comments with a link in one day, otherwise it can look suspicious by Google.

*Note*
Some sites will allow html in your comments. If this is the case then enter you real name in the name field and put the url as your website’s homepage. Then at the end of your comment put the following:

(Your name)
Owner of Your Chosen Anchor Text

- This inserts a link in to your actual comment with the anchor text attached. In this case you would earn 2 free back links as you would have the link that you posted in the URL field of the form, and the link within your comment leading to a different page.

Once you have left a few comments over a number of weeks using the fast blog finder I suggest you simply do a Google search for “list of dofollow blogs” and you will find plenty of lists of blogs which allow dofollow links on them. At this point it won’t matter if they are relevant to our site’s content because you will have already built several relevant back links to your site.

Leaving Links in Forums:

The best way to do this is add a link in your signature on any forums which you participate in regularly or insert them in your profile via your user control panel. Make sure you use your chosen keyword as the anchor text and then attach the link to that text. You can also add links to things like your Facebook page or myspace page, aswell as your MSN homepage (which has a high PR!).

Got any advice?

The best advice I can give you with this is just to stick at it. It isn’t particularly exciting but link building (back linking) is necessary if you want to rank well for a particular keyword or phrase. I would suggest you build a few one day, then have a day or two rest, then build a few more and leave it another couple of days. Doing it like this makes it less tedious and makes it look like more natural link building rather than building 100 new links in one day, which Google would frown upon.