Guest Post by Steve Schafer

Any internet marketing expert will tell you that backlinks are very important when it comes to improving your rank with the various search engines. More backlinks means a higher page rank. A higher page rank means your website is highly respected in the cyberworld.

That is what you may have heard, but is it really true?

Not completely. True authority comes only with quality links. In other words, not just any old links will do. To really increase the authority of your website you must have indexed links that actually have staying power. Accumulating comment links and sending the same article to every directory you can think of just will not get the job done. Instead, you need to implement something called link boosting.

Effective Article Submission

The first step in link boosting does involve article submission to your favorite directories but with a twist. After I have finished a new post for any of my blogs, I prepare a 400 word summary of that post and rewrite it several times. I take care to make sure the rewrites are absolutely unique and submit a different article to each directory on my favorites list. Some of these rewrites also get used as guest posts to other blogs, and all of them will link back to my original post and home page.

Even More Article Submission

Once the submissions have been accepted, I get to work writing an article on a subject that is closely related to the first one. Rewrites of this post get submitted to directories like hubpages and squiddoo, among others. This time the links point to the first set of articles that were sent in. Finally, for added boost, I will bookmark the second set of posts to a couple dozen bookmark sites.

How it Works

The basic idea here is to leverage the page rank of the sites that rank better than yours. Getting a website to at least PR4 is time consuming and not an easy thing to do. Article directories are already sitting at PR5 or PR6. You can use that to your own benefit. Just think about how hard you have to work just to get a PR3 backlink. One of the articles I submitted to ezinearticles.com received a PR3 and I had only pointed a single link back to it. Now that article and the home page have a PR3 link.

While doing your link building, there are a few things that you should keep in mind.

* Quantity is good, but quality is better – In content links from an authority site within your niche is the best backlink you can get.

* Authority “opinion” sites are not far behind – Being mentioned (with a backlink) in someone’s personal blog that gets a lot of traffic and backlinks is almost as good as getting one from an authority site in your niche.

* Blogroll links are not as great as people think – Trading blogroll links will get you a lot of links, if done with big sites, but the links will not count nearly as much as in content links.

* Most comment links are garbage – Leaving good quality comments with a link back to your site is a good way to get people to visit and interact with your site, but not so great for link juice.

This is how you gain authority – by getting strong backlinks that stay. Take the time to do it right and don’t take shortcuts. It takes a bit more work than some of the other link building strategies, but it is well worth the extra work.

Author Bio:
If you are looking for more great tips on SEO and backlinking strategies, you should check out Steve’s Internet Business Guide.