Google dominates the search market and what Google implements typically gets implemented by the other search engines eventually so SEO discussions tend to revolve around Google’s algorithm.  So does this one.  Part of the revolution in search that Google brought about was the use of backlinks – links from someone else’s site to yours – to determine the subject of a particular web page.  In other words if a site about gardening tools linked to one of your pages with the anchor text “power leaf blower reviews” then Google considered this a vote for that page under the keyword phrase “power leaf blower reviews”.

Several years ago internet marketers became fully aware of the importance Google placed on backlinks in general and the anchor text of the backlink.  As a result 2 things began to happen:

1. Link Selling/Trading
2. Forum and Blog SPAM

In response Google changed their algorithm.  How the algorithm was changed is outside the scope of this post but Google began discounting links that appeared to come from link selling/trading sites and they began using the “nofollow” tag.  The result is that posting to forums and blogs is, for the most part, useless from an SEO standpoint.  (There are other reasons to post to forums and blogs such as just good traffic and viral marketing.)  Also, trading or buying links has become almost useless as well.

If no one knows your site exists, then how do you get backlinks?

The question for every owner of a new internet site is how do I get people to my site?  The answer, for now (July 2009), is article marketing.  Article marketing on Web 2.0 properties appears to be the best way to build quality backlinks for your site.  Web 2.0 properties include sites like EzineArticles, Hubpages, Squidoo, and WordPress.org.

These Web 2.0 properties get crawled by the Google algorithm almost constantly.  When you add a new article Google sees it within a day or so.  Within a week of creating a new site I was able to rank at #7 on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  Granted this was for a low traffic keyword with little competition but my first site took close to 3 months before I showed up for any keyword and even then it was only a low traffic keyword buried on the 3^rd or 4^th SERP.  Within 6 months my first website achieved a Page Rank of 3 without any site optimization for SEO and without any SEO backlink strategy.  My latest site is in the starting its process of 3 months sooner.

How do I get backlinks from Web 2.0 Sites?

Every site has a different set of rules for how to get your backlinks to count without the “nofollow” tag.  Currently, my favorite is Hubpages.  I find the page layout to be the easiest while still allowing you to add graphics, polls, etc. to make your articles more engaging.  Hubpages will allow up to 3 links any given article before they get cranky.  When you first start posting all of your links will have the “nofollow” tag – therefore no help to your SEO/SERP ranking.  However, after you have achieved a score of 75 (as a user) your backlinks will no longer have the “nofollow” tag.

Typically you can achieve a Hubpages user score of 75 with about 3 articles.  However, if you put up 3 articles and stop then your user score will begin to drop within a couple of weeks.  This shouldn’t really be an issue though – you are trying to build backlinks to your site and to specific pages on your site so you should adding Hubpages articles as often as you can.  The more links the better for your SEO.

Generic backlink differences between Web 2.0 Sites

In Hubpages you typically include links in a Links or Resources box that you can place anywhere on Hub.  For Ezine you are supposed to keep links out of your article text and only include links in a resource box at the bottom of the article.  For me, the need to place a backlink in the resource box at the end means that the Ezine article needs to be more narrowly focused than the Hubpages hub.  That way any visitor to Ezine who reads my article knows exactly what kind of content will be on the page I’m linking to.  Whereas on Hubpages I create multiple link or resource boxes – one for each section sometimes – allowing me to tailor the backlink to the section or even paragraph beside it.

That said, for SEO purposes it is best to narrowly focus your Web 2.0 articles around one or two keywords with as few links as possible in the article.