Free Link Building Tools

Posted by Leo on April 15th, 2008 at 07:36am

Link building is essential for off-page SEO. Google counts each link as a vote to your website. The more links you have, Google would think your site is more important. The higher the pagerank where your link is placed, the more important the vote.

There are a few ways that link building can be done easily. They are:

1. Directory Submissions

The first thing I would do is to submit all websites to all sorts of directories, both local and international. Dmoz would be a good example of it.

One thing to note is that the page rank is usually higher on the homepage, but if you submit a site to the directory, the page that you landed onto might not have a pagerank as high.

To speed things up, I would suggest using the ‘Directory Submittor’. It is a free software and of course, you can pay to update it. The free submittor allows you to access 350 directories for free! You can sort the directories by page rank and work on the ones with higher page rank first.

Submission is not really automatic, hence I still regard it as white hat. The program would bring up the registration page of the directories one by one, with some information already filled in. You just have to fill in the missing bits and click “submit” and that’s done. (Click here or the icon to download)

2. Article Submissions

The other popular way is to submit your articles to the online article sites. As you probably know, search engines love article sites as it is usually full of contents (text). Therefore, submitting your articles to these sites would produce a lot of quality 1-way link to your site.

Again, this process can be automated (a bit). Using ‘Article Submitter’ would surely help you on this. The free version of this would allow you to submit to 85 article sites. And you can upgrade it, which would allow you to access 668 sites! And it is not one time access. In fact, you can do that everyday! Imagine how the 85 links, accumulated everyday, would help you on link building.

Click here or the icon to download.

3. Social Bookmarking

Sign up to as many social bookmarking sites, so that you have all the buttons sitting on your browser toolbar. After you have finished a post, click on those buttons. Easy!

Most of them allow you to tag your article. Tag as much as you can, as each tag produce a unique URL would links back to your article.

The popular social bookmarking sites include Del.icio.us etc. Well, you probably know more than me.

4. Link Exchange

Many believe that link exchange is not going to produce any results. Reciprocal links would produce less results, hence you have to do a lot of it.

I am using a service named Link2Me for link exchange. You can browse through their database and choose the sites that you want link from / link to. Pretty easy to do. No need to explain.

5. Blog Comments

Commenting on blogs would allow you to create links with the anchor text you want to target. Blog Commentor Lite can help you to speed up this process as well.

Blog Commentor Lite allows you to search for blogs of your niche, and you can load the pages within its own browser, leave comments and get onto the next one.

The Lite version only finds WordPress blogs, but it is already good enough.

Read my post here for further details.

6. Forum Signature

I am sure many people are active in forums as well. Why not having your blog’s URL as signature? Remember, each signature is a 1-way link. Forum pages, if informative, are likely to have pagerank as well.

7. Offline

Well, this is not exactly link building. Put your website on all your email signature, stationery, banners, advertisement… Anything that you can think of. Something to give away in exhibitions (eg. a green shopping bag). Just something to make sure everyone knows your URL.

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