Essential SEO Tools & Resources

Ok, so from my last post you understand the importance that inbound links have on your search engine ranking prospects.

The burning question now, is how do you actually go about getting hundreds of quality inbound links to your web pages?

Let me take you through my own personal strategy …

Over the next three posts, I’ll be covering:

- directory submissions
- forum posting
- article marketing
- reciprocal linking
- rss feeds
- blog commenting

In part 1 of this series we’ll look at how I use Directory Submissions and Forum Posting.

Directory Submissions:

When I first launch a new site, once I’ve published the first 10 – 20 pages, I submit the site to lots of web directories. Here’s a key tip for this strategy; for the first few weeks of a site’s life, I don’t monetise it in any way. If it’s not monetised, it stands a better chance of being accepted by Directory editors. And let’s face it, in the first few weeks of a sites existence, it’s likely not going to get a lot of traffic, so you’re not losing a lot of income … much better to sacrifice the odd adsense click in favour of some links at the early stage of your site’s life.

I use the following free tool for submitting my sites to web directories, Directory Submitter. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute to submit your site details to each directory using this software. It shows you the page rank of each site, so you can start submitting to the high page rank directories first! The tool is free, and really speeds up the submission process.

Some people advise that you should only submit to a few sites each day rather than to a hundred in one go so that your links appear in a natural way. I don’t agree, and tend to sit down for an hour or two and submit to as many as I can in one go. Why don’t I agree with the experts? Well the directories take anywhere from “seconds” to “6 months” to review and accept your site, so you get a natural pattern anyway, even when you submit in buk!

I tend to only submit to directories in the early days of a site’s life, and spend no more than a couple of hours on it. It’s an effective way to get some links in the beginning.

Forum Posting

Posting on forums is a great way to get some very targeted traffic. Plus, if you can find some decent page ranking forums, the links can be of value for ranking purposes.

Simply do some searches on Google for forums and discussion boards within your niche and go and sign up with them. Usually in your member profile you’re allowed to add a URL within your signature.

You’ll be surprised at how many people click on your signature to take a look at your site. Once I’ve joined several sites I use a tool called Forum Submitter Pro to periodically submit a post to all the forums in one go … it’s a useful tool for automating the process. Regular posts will bring you traffic and backlinks.

I use different Anchor Text on each forum, and periodically I go in and change the url and anchor text used in each forum to add variety to my linking pattern.

In Part 2, tomorrow, we’ll look at article marketing, rss feeds & reciprocal linking. Finally in part 3, we’ll look at Blog Commenting in some detail.

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