Backlinks and blogposts

[Jvalops]

What is the best procedure for link building? Does blogposts help?

[Getz.pro]

unfortunately, paid links do work, just ask J.C. Penney! you will find more value long term getting organic links and those you build through participation.

[Dan-Petrovic]

I would start by creating an inventory of your linkable assets and taking a peek at your existing natural links in Google Webmaster Tools. Try to understand why those who already chose to give you a link did so and try to create more cause for linking through content and value on your site.

Once that's out of the way you can move onto finding references of your brand online and create links where they don't exist and they should:

• Mentions of your brand
• Your logo (try tool called tineye for that)
• You URL (but not linked)

Also cover all meaningful directories relevant to your niche and location.

Another great way to get links is by thinking about your business relationships (suppliers, customers, office space, partners...etc). Here you can gain good value through nice contextual linking situation or a testimonial.

Occasional article, blog post/guest blogging, blog commenting can help - though I would advise against use of your key term instead of name in blog comments. That's something spammers tend to do.

If you run out of ideas you can always take a look at your competitor's links using tools such as:

• Majestic SEO
• Linkscape

Or you can use free tools including Yahoo and Google's own link: command.

For more try to read material written by http://ontolo.com/link-building-tools and informatoin already available on SEOMoz http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide

Good luck!

[Jvalops]

I checked a few compettitors and it seems like they are getting links form a blog netwrok. They are pretty good on serch results for competitive keywords as well. what would you say about that? It seems to me they are paid links.

[Getz.pro]

Blogs are great. We have people guest blog for us and this does two things. A) keeps us from having to be very creative, and B) opens the community up by having the blogger reach out to their people to say Hey, I just wrote a blog over here. This almost always turns into inbound links, shares, and Llikes.

Best procedure would be to make sure all on-page is done first. Then I just reach out into the community that has synergies to what site I am working on and start to interact with them. I find forums that allow followed links and participate (sometimes this is only via the signature).

Whatever you do, actually give good information on blogs, forums and such. When you start to look spammy, people reject you.

[debi_zyx]

Hi!  First of all, good luck on your linkbuilding efforts - it's not an easy job.

To answer your second question first, blogging can help with linkbuilding in the following ways:

1. if you write on your own blog with quality content (the more helpful and/or thought-provoking it is the better), readers may link to your post from their own sites or blogs

2. if you guest post on someone else's blog, you will often get backlinks to your site - sometimes within the post, from good anchor text, and sometimes from the author bio at the end

3. commenting on blogs can also help - if you comment often (and wisely) on a blog in your niche, you may develop a reputation that will lead the blog owner and readers back to your blog to see what you have to say.  Make sure that the name you use to write the comment is linked to your blog or site, so they can get back there if they want to. You can also (on rare occasion), drop a link to your site if it would be perceived as helpful.

4. if that comment name has your keywords, that can also provide links to your site - but considering most blogs are no-follow, that opens up the great debate about the value of no-follow links, which is a little broader than should be addressed in this question. And with search engines focusing more on the context of links instead of just the anchor text, it's worth assuming that in a short time - if not already - keyword rich blog comment names are not going to be driving so much value, so you can put in a little effort there, but the main idea is to use those comments to drive a following that will want to come to your site, see what you have to say, be impressed, and link to it of their own accord.

The first question -  "What is the best procedure for link building?" has a much longer answer, and there are plenty of guides put out by the big SEO names on the web to help.  SEOMoz has one of their own: just put "link building guide" into that search box at the top of the screen and you'll get a good number of guided resources.

We're actually working on our own linkbuilding guide at our site - kind of a step-by-step practical compilation of all the ideas that we've seen in blog posts etc. over the two or so years.  Hopefully it'll be ready in about a week or so and I can come and post the link to it then.

Update: here's the promised link building guide.  Take a look and see if it helps.

One hint, though - if you go on Delicious and search for "linkbuilding" tagged pages, and see which pages were tagged the most times, that can give you an idea as to what resources people thought were most valuable as ideas for linkbuilding.

Good luck again,

Aviva B