I’ve read quite a few articles recently about submitting articles to other websites and to free article sites. It’s a great way to secure backlinks. Incidentally, I’ll gladly write an article for your SEO-related website or blog, providing my signature bio and link is published with it.

What I haven’t seen mentioned much is the value of strategically creating a large number of backlinks within your own website.

In 2002 I built my first affiliate marketing website after purchasing and studying various popular affiliate marketing courses available at that time. An SEO strategy touted by affiliate marketing gurus centered around building 5 or 6 HTML product pages and creating text links from the menu bar to these product pages. In phase two, the publisher would then add a few new article pages every week, linking these articles to the product pages. Within a year or two, 50 to 300 pages would link to each product page. The process would often be accelerated by hiring content writers from Elance.

Hundreds of internal backlinks would improve Google ranking while also providing hundreds of potential landing pages, each linking to a money page.

The model proved incredibly effective on my affiliate sites and we began to add article pages to our SEO client’s sites to improve their rankings as well.

A new spin on this model is to substitute a blog for the article pages, linking posts to the static affiliate product pages or pages promoting the company’s products or services. To date this has not been as effective as the HTML article pages and we suspect it’s because archived blog content may be receiving a lower content value than a permanent page. I’d like to get your take on this and welcome your comments.

If you’ve been missing out on the power of internal backlinks, give the Affiliate Marketer’s Website Model a try.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, developing backlinks, backlink strategy

I found a new link building technique while I visiting EJ Cooksey at MyBlogLog. The concept was originally started by Alex over at HowtoSpoter.com. This is a great web 2.0 link building tactic and can greatly increase your incoming links if you use it.

— copy and paste the Reciprocal Review Carousel and instructions below this line —

Reciprocal Review Carousel idea is based on a few simple yet effective link-building and blogging techniques I have learned:

• Build value of the blog by creating a helpful link from within content.
• Provide value to community by doing a review on a blog you personally like.
• Link to YOUR blog has exact anchor text you want and helps you boost Google Rankings.
• No more than 30 outbound links from any page to prevent penalties for link farming.
• Viral effect of the link – as more bloggers participate, link to your blog with YOUR anchor text, coming from quality content post will spread.

Check out how this started (opens in a new window) then come back here and see what has changed on the review list below and you will see how this works immediately.

Here is How to participate:

• Copy the entire text between the specified lines.
• Create a post on your site and put at least one paragraph explaining how you joined the Reciprocal Review Carousel.
• Paste the text you copied into your post.
• Remove the Bottom Review and At the Top add your own review with a link to a site reviewed, at least 2 sentences about the site and a note – Reviewed by: Your Anchor Text. Link your anchor text to your site.

Here is an example:

WordPress Web 2.0 Guide is a blog providing very useful information on building your very own Web 2.0 portal based on WordPress. Detailed instructions and how to guides make it possible for anyone to create a sparkling and engaging blog and join the community of like-minded individuals. Reviewed by: WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-er
Sites Reviewed:

• Make Money The Quick and Easy Way! EJ Cooksey’s site contains a wealth of money making information. The site follows her journey of going from a Stay at Home Mom to a Millionaire Mom using various ways to make money online. Reviewed by: The SEO Only Blog
• Carol King’s Home Business-Know How Blog Carol King has a wealth of information about home business opportunities as well as ebooks, reviews, articles, tips and ideas. If you are needing to know more about online home based business then be sure to visit her site. Reviewed by: Make Money Online the Quick and Easy Way
• OnlineSecurityAuthority has everything you need to know about online security. Whether you are in need of the latest information on personal computing, blocking mySpace, ID Theft, RFID, Dating, or Banking this is the site to visit for all online security information. Reviewed by: AskAnissa
• Peter Lenkefi writes about Web 2.0 marketing strategies at Web2Center.com. He has some killer videos over there you should check out along with a ton of good information on blog marketing and various “new media” promotion tactics. Reviewed by: Link Building Maniac, Jack Humphrey, for the Friday Traffic Report
• Andy-Coates.com is an original creator of Viralink concept and a blog publishing information on Magic, Personal development and blog development. I have found a wealth of information on getting your blog noticed and generating the traffic for free. Reviewed by: WordPress Web 2.0 Guide
• FitForFreedom is well-established blog where you can find multitude of information on achieving financial freedom. Blog is run by Marco Righter and his writing style greatly adds to the value of information he provides. Reviewed by: Alex
• Secure Your PC For Internet blog run by Colin and provides essential information everyone accessing internet should know. Identity theft is becoming more and more of an issue and by visiting his blog you can minimize the risk of being compromised. Reviewed by: Alex
• Home With Heather is a great informative blog targeting WAHM (Work At Home Moms) and run by … you guessed it – Heather Masson. Information on what works for her in Internet Business written is very easy to read and comes from her personal experience. Reviewed by: Alex
• A Copywriter’s Blues blog published by Alex Badalic, a veteran of advertising turned musician gives you great food for soul. I have found some nice old videos of Johnny Cash performance and he has a lot more of vintage videos to satisfy fans. Reviewed by: Alex
• Did You Smell That blog authored by one of the veterans on network marketing filled with business ideas you can use. David Ledoux is well known and respected in online community and now he makes his experience available via blog posts. Reviewed by: Alex
• Best Damn Blog run by Richard Wing is all about Internet Marketing. Your visit will be rewarded by honest reviews, freebies and information you need to succeed in this cut-throat business without sacrificing your integrity. Reviewed by: Alex

— copy and paste the Reciprocal Review Carousel and instructions above this line —

Feel free to join the carousel and please add reviews to the sites you like. Just copy and paste the entire post above including the two red lines, do an opening paragraph like the one I started this post with, paste what you just copied, take the bottom review in the review list off and add a review to this site at the top, like I did for EJ Cooksay’s Make Money The Quick and Easy Way! site with a “Reviewed by:” link back to your site.

Post it and watch your traffic grow!

To Your Success!

Search engines like Google place considerable weight upon your site’s popularity index. All things being equal, if your site has five hundred and forty-one theme-related inbound links and your competitor’s site has only eight, you will be ranked considerably higher.

There’s no quick way to establish quality links with theme-related sites. Good search engine marketers (SEM) do it the old fashioned way, with public relations techniques, contacting webmasters of websites by personal email, explaining the value of exchanging links with your site. Cross-linking is the practice of placing outbound links to each other’s site, forming a strategic alliance.

Cautionary note: Services that offer thousands of ’search engine submissions’ generally use automated software to submit the site to thousands of FFA sites, a spam network that top search engines reject. I recommend avoiding the ‘tricks’ of the trade. They could get your site banned entirely.

Internal links assure that the website is properly spidered and that all pages will be found. It builds the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase and increases the PageRank of internal pages.

We employ both cross-linking and internal links in our site promotion strategy.