There are an unlimited number of ways to obtain high-quality backlinks. You’ve probably heard about many of them, including social bookmarking, linkbait, guest posting, directory submissions, press releases, etc. etc. etc…

Thankfully, we won’t be talking about those regurgitated strategies today. Instead, I have compiled over 100 out-of-the-box strategies to increase your link popularity and send tons of traffic your way.

This article contains all of my link building secrets, so I suggest you take some time to digest it. Grab some herbal tea (or Redbull) , whichever one works best for you, and don’t forget to bookmark the article for future reference.

The first juicy link building tactic is to create your own Ebay blog. Did you know you can
get backlinks directly from Ebay? That’s right. Ebay provides their members with their own personal blogs. Take a look at SEO superstar, Jim Boykin’s eBay blog. Notice the contextual links within the article which include his desired anchor text. If you check the source code, you will also find that these links are followed. You can create your own eBay blog and start building a few of your own high-powered links.

You can also build links with contests. Holding a blog contest is a great way to grow your blog’s audience, build inbound links, and improve your search engine presence. John Chow and John Cow have both used contests to rapidly increase his blog popularity.

You can promote your contest through the following sites…

Click here to read the full article at zanypixel.com

Basically, it’s a way of writing your HTML in a more meaningful, structured and to be honest, sensible way. It’s all about using your header tags (H1, H2, etc) for yep, you guessed it – headers, instead of bolding the text and increasing the font size with the old <font size=”10000000000000000000″> tag. For paragraphs, use the <p> tag rather than sizing the font and adding hundreds of line breaks, for lists use the <li> tag, and so on.

If you want to add an image, you use the <img=…> tag because it’s the tag for inserting images, so it stands to reason really that when you’re adding a heading, list, etc, you use the correct tag, not some sort of bodge. Got it? Great.

So why use Semantic HTML? What are the benefits? Why can’t I just do things my way?

Well you can just do things your way if you want, but I’d probably not advise it. The biggest benefit of using Semantic Code is that you’ll be adhering to the Internet standard. And the benefit of that is that when things change and progress as they like to do on the Internet, the stuff that makes your site work isn’t going to get left behind.

Another great benefit is that it’ll make your pages load quicker. You whack all the crap and formatting in an external stylesheet, and it only needs to be declared and loaded once. For example:

1. Crappy HTML – <font size=”3″ color=”#000000″><i>HELLO!</i></font><br><br>
2. Over the top XHTML – <div class=”big_heading”>Hello!</div>
3. Semantic HTML – <h1>Hello!</h1>

Make sense? Lovely clean, uncluttered code. All the browsers and all the software know that number 3 is a heading. The other two are, for all anyone knows from looking at the code, just some formatted text. And if you check the HTML of this page, you’ll see that I also use the list tag there, because yep, it’s a list.

It’ll also make the tedious task of making a website cross-browser compatible a lot easier.

But why do I care what my code looks like? I just want my site to look pretty!

But it can still look pretty! Both inside and out! And what’s the point in your site looking pretty if no-one can find it? Semantic code is also great for SEO! GoogleBot and co love semantic code. They don’t judge your site by how pretty it looks, they look at your code and work out what’s important, pick out keywords etc. The less clutter, and better formatted it is, the easier GoogleBot can find what’s important in your page.

If there’s a heading tag <h1>Gay Bars in London</h1>, GoogleBot’s going to note that down as being important and that the site’s obviously about Gay Bars in London. It’s common sense really. When GoogleBot sees<font size=”23694″ color=”pink”><b>Gay Bars In London</b></font>, he thinks “what’s all that crap around those words?”, not “there’s a heading!”.

Accessibility

And here’s another benefit – it’ll make your code accessible. Screen readers (what a blind person would use to surf the net) work in a similar way to the search engine bots in that they don’t care how pretty your page is, they want to know what the content is, and then read the text out loud for the end user. Now, to be of any use, the website needs to be read in the right order. If you’ve got messy code everywhere the screen reader is going to get confused and possibly misinterpret your page. And please, take note that the <b> or <em> tags are used to add emphasis to something, and in screen reader language that means it’ll “shout” it, so do think carefully where you use those tags. If in doubt, a top tip is to set up a style in your CSS that bolds the text and use <span class=”b”>Hello</span> instead. Similarly, we all know that in Internet speak, writing in capital letters is considered shouting, so if you’re using capital letters somewhere for visual effect, use a text-transform style in your CSS so your content isn’t shouted at the user.

In Summary

So to sum up, please code your pages semantically. It’s for the benefit of everyone, and once you learn how to do it, it’ll save you time too. Just writing short tags instead of styling everything up in the body of the page means a lot less typing for you. And above all, it’s just the right way to do things!

And to finish, here’s a little quiz for you. Just highlight the black blocks to reveal the answer.

For a heading, what tag should you use? Answer: The Heading tag

And for a list? Answer: The List tag

For a paragraph? Answer: The Paragraph tag

Now give yourself a pat on the back and sort your site out!

One of my Web 2.0 style sites has over 10,000 pages indexed in Google now after just 1 year, and I manually created about 5 of those. Not only that, but the beauty of the whole Web 2.0 concept is that as people are effectively creating the content for you, they want to share what they’ve done with others. Hey presto, looooooads of backlinks.

Lots of content + lots of backlinks, many of them deeplinks = brilliant search engine traffic. And brilliant search engine traffic = more visitors, more users and more content. Once you’ve got site that works, it’s just going to grow and grow, particularly if you’re creating a strong user base that’ll continue to return to your site.

It’s genius really. And while I’m in a proverby mood, if that’s a word, lets go with a slightly modified version of an old classic – “They do the work, so you don’t have to”.

They’re a pain in the backside to build up, especially quality backlinks, and unless you want to go down the route of purchasing some high PR backlinks, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do some hard work.

Now, I’m all for shortcuts that make life easier and leave you more time to put your feet up, so I’ve been doing a bit of experimenting lately which I’m hoping I’ll find the results of when the next Google pagerank update comes along.

I’ve done quite a lot of reading up on forums and various SEO related sites about how useful Myspace backlinks actually are. The general consensus seems to be that Myspace is a brilliant marketing tool – which it definitely is – and that Myspace backlinks are practically useless.

I don’t buy that though, not yet anyway. So I’ve been doing some experimenting over the last few months on one of my sites, and I’ve delved into the world of Myspace. It didn’t take long for my site’s name and url to get around given (a) it was music based, (b) part of a small niche on the net, and (c) actually useful to a large portion of Myspace users. So with this in mind, it wasn’t long before more and more people would request to be a friend of mine, people would pick up the link to my site via my profile and share it with each other via comments on each other’s pages – and each time they’re doing that, they’re adding a backlink. In just a few months hundreds of backlinks have been created, and I could just sit back and let people do the work for me. Great stuff!

Now, I’ve no idea how this has effected the site in question’s PR yet, but what I can tell you is that it’s flown up the SERP’s and search engine traffic has increased dramatically – not to mention the extra traffic generated from people passing the site around Myspace, so the experiment has certainly been beneficial thus far.

As for increasing my PR? Well, the big argument against Myspace backlinks seems to be that they’re generally just a lot PR0’s. I have however noticed my site’s link appearing in the comments section of a few profiles with PR’s of 2-5, so they’re not all totally useless. And as I mentioned, the SERP positions have increased on a weekly basis. So now, I’m just waiting to see if that little green bar grows a little, and to find out just how many useless Myspace backlinks you need to make them useful.

I’ll keep you posted!