Ladies and Gents, boys and girls, you are in for a treat. I am feeling particularly magnanimous this holiday season and figure this year I’m going to dish out some incredible ways to build backlinks.

As you all know, Search Engine Optimization, especially when it come to ranking high in the “big 3” – yahoo, msn (bing), and google, primarily revolves around the quality and quantity of links pointing to your site.  Here are a couple of great ways to build tons and tons of backlinks like a professional, without downloading any programs or spending a huge amount of time emailing webmasters, begging for links.

First things first, the easiest way to get a link to your site is to post a comment on a blog with your link in the comment, or your url provided so that your “name” is the anchor text for your link.  E.g. – “Hey, nice article on puppies.  I have a black lab.”  Enter your name, email, and website and presto! One backlink down.

The only problem with this is that some of these links don’t count.  Wait Justin, what do you mean some of these links don’t count?

Well, google devised this way of evening the playing field so that happy SEO nerds like me couldn’t merely comment a thousand blogs and then jump to the top for a given keyword.  This is done through inserting rel=“no follow” into the <a> tag (link code), and is automatically done by default by most blogging platforms: wordpress, blogger, typepad, etc.

Now a number of webmasters do not agree with this, and they have enabled “dofollow”, meaning they will give your link credit if they decide to approve your comment.

So, we don’t want to waste our time commenting blogs that don’t “dofollow”.  Firefox has a wonderful add-on that will show you which links are dofollow and which are nofollow: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687.  Bon appétit!

Wait, Justin, knowing whether I’m going to get a good link for commenting a certain blog is awesome, but how do I find these blogs?

First things first, we want a high PR for our website, correct?  So lets ask ourselves, what kind of websites almost always have high pagerank that we can post a comments on?  Why .edu and .gov sites of course!

Enter this into google, of course replacing the word “keyword” with the phrase that you want to rank highly for:

site:.edu inurl:blog “keyword”
site:.gov inurl:blog “keyword”

As you visit each site, make sure your dofollow plugin is enabled.  When you find a good dofollow .edu or .gov site, note the site, and leave a good, relevant comment – DO NOT SPAM!!! – and every couple of days stop back by and comment another article.

You can do the same search for all other site types by merely searching google for:

inurl:blog “keyword”

Another great place to get backlinks quickly is DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites.  Here’s a list (in order of pagerank with alexa traffic rank).  Create an account, register or suggest your site, and watch the traffic start rolling in!

Pagerank 9

  • technorati.com 694
  • slashdot.org 1,605

Pagerank 8

  • reddit.com 574
  • mixx.com 854
  • propeller.com 2,027

Pagerank  7

  • metafilter.com 2,451
  • wikio.com 3,331
  • care2.com 3,190
  • folkd.com 4,098
  • connotea.org 8,197

Pagerank 6

  • dzone.com 3,836
  • sphinn.com 4,945
  • linkagogo.com 11,499
  • kirtsy.com 16,850
  • tipd.com 23,528
  • kwoff.com 24,261
  • bloghop.com 31,217
  • weheartgossip.com 32,225

Pagerank 5

  • indianpad.com 3,185
  • spotback.com 11,391
  • mylinkvault.com 12,748
  • buddymarks.com 13,857
  • plime.com 18,583
  • designfloat.com 22,384
  • web2list.com 23,051
  • fcc.com 37,050
  • linkatopia.com 40,811
  • iliketotallyloveit.com 42,754
  • japansoc.com 60,200
  • buzzup.com 68,384
  • scoopit.co.nz 91,077
  • ngopost.org 94,741

Pagerank 4

  • humsurfer.com 1,321
  • a1-webmarks.com 10,230
  • oyax.com 11,312
  • socialogs.com 19,806
  • quadriot.com 22,255
  • blurpalicious.com 22,742
  • wagg.it 23,275
  • uvouch.com 24,122
  • blogmarks.net 24,989
  • maple.nu 27,330
  • mysitevote.com 33,282
  • blogbookmark.com 33,810
  • blogengage.com 38,085
  • pageactive.org 40,026
  • totalpad.com 47,978
  • solinkable.com 48,485
  • graphic-design-links.com 52,491
  • justpoint.org 55,067
  • indiareporting.com 60,218
  • feedmarker.com 67,554
  • pfbuzz.com 83,239
  • websapiens.net 86,767
  • ioch.org 14,140,955

Happy Holidays to all and I hope you use your new SEO Super Powers wisely! Next week I’ll be talking about CommentLuv, so check back here at GeekEstate regularly!