Many people like to use social media sites in order to gain popularity, and to heavily increase their traffic if a story that they write hits the front pages of many of the top social media sites.

The problem with some of the social media sites, is that they don’t provide much search engine benefit, because they either use a redirection URL to connect people with your page, or they simply use the “nofollow” tag on your links. (What is nofollow?) Whichever they use, they pass on no search engine ranking benefit, and many of those sites have high PR.

When building links, having traffic sources in mind is a good idea, but your main focus should be links that have “dofollow” (What is dofollow?) because that will increase your search engine rankings, will should be your main goal for your traffic source. Millions of people use Google daily… why not bring some of them who are your for a site like yours, right to your site.

So, here are some of the best social media sites to use for both traffic and search engine rankings:

Digg (PR8)
Many people are already Digging their articles, so continue doing this.

Mixx (PR6)
Mixx is a great up and comer, which makes it a lot easier to rank your articles and pages on the front of Mixx, and you get search engine ranking benefits from your pages and posts being on Mixx.

IndianPad (PR6)
This is a great social media site geared towards the people of India, but since they are growing so fast in all aspects of the internet, this is a great market to reach out to. There are some technology articles on there that have nothing to do with India, that are ranking well, so you definitely have a shot!

Metafilter (PR7)
This is also a great site to submit your articles, posts, and pages.

Reddit (PR8)
A recommendation from a reader to put this on here… it looks decent!

I hope this has expanded your social media selection a little bit, and helped you to focus your traffic building efforts with your link building efforts.

P.S. Be sure to add your site to the profile pages on these different sites!

Some of my most popular posts on this blog are:
How To Check How Many Backlinks Your Site Has
and
How To Check How Many Backlinks Your Site Has – Part 2

When people start link building campaigns, they want to be able to check their progress. Thanks to various websites who provide tools to see how many backlinks each site has (see the above articles), seeing that progress and your results is fairly easy to do. But, many people either use the tools improperly, use too many or too few tools, waste time, or just simply don’t use their full potential. Here are some tips to using backlink checking tools.

1. Don’t just use Google and Yahoo.
Many people when checking their backlinks, go to Google and type in “link:YourURLhere” and they usually don’t see many results, and therefore get discouraged. Yahoo!’s “link:YourURLhere” search does return more results, but it’s still not complete. Don’t just rely on these resources. Google’s Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo!’s SiteExplorer tools will give better results, but still don’t just rely on these.

2. Use multiple tools to check.
There are many different tools online that allow you to see how many backlinks your site has. But, they are not all created equal. Some use averages of major search engine numbers, Others don’t work with all search engines. Some provide you much more information such as your PageRank, your Alexa rank, the site your link is on’ PageRank, etc. Find 2 or 3 different tools that work the best for you, and stick with those. Sticking with just one won’t give you the most accurate, but using more than 3 or 4 will just be a waste of time.

3. Don’t compare one tool’s results to another tool’s results.
Even though I suggest using 2-3 different tools to check your backlinks, that doesn’t mean that you should compare them against eachother. The best thing to do is to create a spreadsheet, or just a normal .txt document, and write down the results from each tool. Then, once a week, check your results again, and log it in the spreadsheet. Then you can see the progress you have made with each tool.

4. Don’t check multiple times a day, or even week.
I know as a webmaster myself, that I want to check my stats multiple times a day. This is pretty useless, and a waste of time. Why waste your time checking your backlinks multiple times a day when you can focus your efforts on link building during that same time. If you focus on link building, you’ll be able to be more excited when you do check your results. Check maybe once or twice a week. You should pick a day, and check on that day every week.

5. Check your competitors backlinks.
When you are checking your backlinks, it is a good idea to check your competitor’s backlinks too. Find out what pages they have links on and see if you can get links on the same pages. You can also check if they are steadily increasing their backlinks or not. If they are not, then you know they are just begging to be taken over in the search engine rankings.

If you stick to these rules, you will be able to better see your progress and utilize your time and the tools better, in order to reach the top of the search engine rankings by focusing your efforts on link building instead of stat checking.

Wow… whenever I go through my RSS reader, I always see awesome posts people have written about link building tips. One particular place that I usually find great tips is Mixed Market Arts. I recently wrote about link building with Unasked, which is a great tip I got from Collin at Mixed Market Arts.

Today’s tip is also from Collin, but I have expanded on it to create even more opportunities for you to create solid free backlinks.

The article on Mixed Market Arts, Link Building with Gather, shows you an awesome site which allows people to submit articles to, called Gather.

Before you go read the article on Mixed Market Arts, read-on here for a way to go above and beyond the tips Collin provides, with regards to creating backlinks.

Collin talks about joining Gather, and submitting articles with backlinks in the articles, with the anchor text of your choice. All of those links are “dofollow” links. (What is dofollow?)

While I was sitting back amazed at this great link building opportunity, I realized that using their comment system, you can leave comments on people’s articles, and the comments have “dofollow” links also! This is an amazing opportunity.

1) Use the Gather search form, type in your keyword (for me, I’d type in “link building”). Then, find articles that people have written about your keyword. Then, leave a non-spam looking, legit comment on their articles, using a link with the anchor text of your choosing (just use normal HTML tags for links) and you have just built a backlink!

2) Find the articles with higher PR. Although this will be harder to do, and the links will not be relevant links, they will still be pr4, pr3, and pr2 links back to your website with the anchor text of your choice.

I hope that now when you read the article about Gather over at Mixed Market Arts, you can build more backlinks to your site using Gather.  We all love free backlinks!

Yesterday, I briefly touched on the importance of linking to sites with your backlinks on it. Today, I am going to show you a tool that you can use that generates a nice quick list of backlinks to a few sites that have “dofollow” (What is dofollow?) backlinks to your site.

To generate this list, you first need to go to:
Free Backlink Generator

Then, scroll down the page a little bit, and enter your website parts into their specific sections. (Note: If your website doesn’t use www such as http://inlineseo.com then just delete the www part.) Then, click “Get Free Backlinks.”

Then, go on your blog or website, and post the HTML code that the tool generated into a post or page. It will look like this:

• URL Trends
• Whois.net
• Domain Tools
• About Us Wiki
• Quick Whois
• iWebTools
• Dawjee.com

Each of those pages has a “dofollow” link back to your site.

Although this tool really doesn’t generate backlinks (since they already exist on the internet), it does allow you to put those links on your page which accomplishes 2 things:

1) Allows Google (and other search engines) to find those pages and count those pages as a backlink for your site.
2) It passes some link juice from your site to those sites, and in turn, those sites are passing link juice to you.

This isn’t going to hugely affect your search engine rankings, nor is it some magic tool. But, it is a nice reference tool, and useful in allowing the search engines to find your backlinks easier. This shouldn’t be your only link building tool, but it should be a part of your larger link building campaigns.

P.S.  Another free backlinks generator is our DoFollow Blogs Search Engine, DoFollow Diver! Easily search for dofollow blogs to comment on!

Recently I wrote about using your online profiles for link building. The basic premise is that everywhere you have a profile online that allows you to put a website address on it, you should, since that will be one more backlinks to your site.

As I was reading one of the blogs I am subscribed to, I came across a post about an online profile you can create, which has your backlink on it. This site was Unasked, a Yahoo! Answers type website, where you can answer people’s questions. Although, if you answer a question with a link to your site, the link is “nofollow” (What is nofollow?) so it doesn’t quite count as a backlink for Google. But, every time you answer a question, it links to your profile, which contains the “dofollow” link to your website, with the anchor text of your choice. So, go and answer some questions, and increase your backlinks with this awesome one way link building method. Check out my link building on my Unmasked profile.

This site exemplifies a great link building concept I will be writing on in the near future. The basic premise is that if you build links to your site using promotional pages, then you should also be building links back to those promotional pages, in order to make the link to your original site even more effective. I’ll write about this in the next few weeks.

Thanks to Mixed Market Arts for this tip:
Link Building with Unmasked