How to build valuable links to your website and get paid for it too

April 27, 2008 – 5:11 pm

About a year ago I discovered Squidoo.com and never gave it much of a look over. For anyone that doesn’t know what the site is about Squidoo allows anyone to write content and post it on their own section of the site in much the same way that a blog works. If you want to make money from your content then you can sign up for Google Ad Sense and place ads on your pages and any revenue that you make from a page on Squidoo you have content on you split with Squidoo and yourself.

If you have a fliar for writing then sites like Squidoo.com, Gather.com and Hubpages.com, all allow you to make money from your content and network with other writers.

Now I’m not the best at writing so I would probably never make much money from my articles but what these sites do offer is something far more useful. You may or may not be aware  that building links is the key to driving traffic to your websites AND to increasing your positions in search engine results for a keyword. The Google algorithm is complicated; it uses onpage and offpage factors to decide where your website will appear in the search engines. For example if you have a website about money making, and you want your website to appear for the term money making you want to have as many links pointing to your website with the phrase ‘money making’ in the link text. This is an over simplified example but is essentially what happens.

In the world of search engines a link acts as a vote, links from high quality websites are more valuable than links from low quality websites. Because many sites allow you to add your own links to them like social bookmarking sites; most of these sites add a tag to the HTML called the ’nofollow’ tag this means that any links pointing to your site from a link with a ‘nofollow’ tag will not be counted by Google in its algorithm.

So you need to find sites that you can add links to that don’t use the ‘nofollow’ tag. Which is exactly where the article websites - Squidoo, Hubpages and Gather come in.  I am in the middle of building a small website about Puerto Pollensa, so I need to source links that point to the site with the keyword ‘puerto pollensa’ in them. The easiest way I found to do this is to write an article about Puerto Pollensa then post it on Gather - Puerto Pollensa  and Hubpages - Puerto Pollensa and make sure that there are links pointing back to my site from each article.

This is a simple and effective way of building valuable links to your website or blog.