Have you started building links to your site yet? If you have, “Well done!” If you haven’t, “Didn’t I make myself clear? You need to build links if you want to get better rankings.” ☺

Last week I had a quick look at link wheels and got some great feedback from many readers. One thing’s for sure, people are using them and we all have different ways of building them.

As an affiliate marketer, traffic building should be a major part of your day to day work and link building is becoming an even more important part if you’re drawing traffic from the search engines.

Mass Links Vs. Quality Links

There is quite the debate raging about what sort of text links you should use. Which ever you choose, you must build your links on an ongoing basis. Google looks for patterns. If you suddenly get 1,000 links and then you don’t build any more, Google is likely to ignore them. If you build 1,000 links every month, you are more likely to get results from them. If you can drip feed those links throughout the month, it will seem even more natural.

Mass link building

In my research, and experience, I have found that the majority of sites that mass links are added to are low Quality Score sites and Google indexes only a small percentage of the links you add. When I do bulk links, I do large amounts of them – 1,000 a day or more. I build them using software and use a range of sites to add them to.

I’m sure you have seen a range of tools to help you do this so I’m not going to recommend one but I personally like online based tools because they don’t chew up my computer's processing power and my bandwidth.

One thing that I ensure that I do when building these links, is that I set up to building them every day for a year or every 5 days for a year. I want the search engines to see consistency in my efforts.

Quality links

If you build links on high quality sites, there is a greater chance of them being indexed because the search engines recognize that those sites have good content and are updated regularly. The problem is that getting a link on these sites is much more time consuming than getting mass links.

Some sites require registration and confirmation of everything you do and others won’t accept links so you waste time writing to them. This doesn’t mean that it’s not worth the effort to try.

There are many sites such as article directories and Web 2.0 sites that are regarded well by Google and are relatively easy to work with. Writing articles for EzineArticles.com is easy to do, you can include a link to your website and they rank very well as well.

Many of the sites which were discussed in the link wheel article last week, also give you similar opportunities. For example, Squidoo allows you to build pages that can include your content and links, as does Hub Pages. These are good places to start and you can build multiple hubs and lenses to point back to your site. Once again, do this consistently. Add a new lens each month or add a new page to  your hub each month.

But what links will work for you and which ones won’t?

The answer to this question is simple: Build your links in the places that Google indexes.

If you find a site that you want to add a link to, check to see how well it’s indexed in Google. Use the “site:www.theirdomain.com” command. If you can find the links page or a profile page, chances are your link will get found.

Use lists of recommended places to build links. These can be found online or you can purchase lists such as Angela’s and Paul’s links.

One thing to remember: The search engines don’t show every link that they index. I know of sites that have thousands of backlinks showing in Yahoo! but only 50 showing in Google. I tend to ignore this statistic and just get on with my backlinking and watch my rankings instead.

Need a place to start?

The first place I start is by social bookmarking my site. Get our list from this article - Social Bookmarking and Digg in!