It’s Day 23 of Reboot Your Blog and I welcome you!

It’s the home stretch, the last hurrah, and we’re going to make it count – this week is all about link building!

Building backlinks is one of the favorite topics of readers of this blog – and for good reason! Without them, your SEO is SOL.

Today we’ll start getting your backlink-building process in order.

Day 23 Objective

Start building backlinks to your backlinks.

Day 23 Assignment

Backlinks are funny. If they’re easy to get, they’re (usually) not that valuable. It’s the hard to get ones that are worth the most for your SEO efforts. (There’s got to be a joke about men in there somewhere, but I’m trying to stay focused on link building…)

Easy to get backlinks might be links from places like social bookmarking sites. Anyone can get them and they’re not terribly valuable on their own. They are worth having… but you don’t want to put a lot of effort into getting them.

Another, more difficult kind of backlink to get could be one from a micro blog kind of site like Squidoo. It’s going to take more time and effort to get that kind of link – you’ve got to write content, design your lens, add modules, get approved by Squidoo, etc. Sure, anyone can get these kinds of links, but not everyone will bother.

Like men, even lower quality backlinks can be massaged and transformed into something more useful with a little patience and a little work.

We do this by building backlinks to our backlinks:

That way, we’re making to original property more valuable – therefore the link it sends to your main URL is more valuable.

Automating Backlinks for Backlinks

Getting backlinks for your backlinks is NOT a process you want to be doing by hand.

What you’re trying to do here is throw out a whole load of backlinks that will then point to your low to mid level backlinks (like Squidoo pages you’ve created that link to your main site).

And since you’ll need a whole load of these super-low level backlinks to point to your backlinks, you don’t want to spend a lot of time or resources getting them.

I’ll cover a few ways you can automate this process, but first, you need to know what backlinks you currently have so you can begin working with those.

Gathering Your Past Backlinks

Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account. Oh dang, you don’t have one? Go back to Day 10 and get on it!

Select the site you’re working on and from the dashboard, go to “Your Site on the Web” —> “Links to Your Site”. Then click “More” under the “Who Links the Most” table:

On that page, click on the “Download More Sample Links” link:

When you do that, you’ll get a .csv of a set of what Google calls “sample links.” These are sites that link to you, but not ALL of the URL’s that link to you. How many links you’ll get in your report seems to vary and is dependent on how many links your site has, among other secret Googley factors they don’t share with us.

The Backlinks For Backlinks Toolset

There are several options here and I’ll share them with you so you can decide what’s the best match – it’ll depend on your budget, how many links you’re building backlinks for, how may sites you have, if you have someone you’re outsourcing to, etc.

LINKLICIOUS.ME

Linklicious.me is unique in that it provides a 100% crawl rate – so all of the backlinks that you put into it are guaranteed to be crawled by Google, and even tell you when the links are crawled by Google in your Reports. Basically, they create an RSS feed of all of your backlinks and then ping that RSS feed which sends the spiders to discover those backlinks.

There are 3 account levels, one of them being FREE. I know you like that, but with the free version, they only ping up to 20% of your links and don’t guarantee a 100% crawl rate. One the free accounts, they also won’t keep your links after they’ve been crawled.

Here’s a look at the interface:

I like Linklicious.me for it’s simplicity and the guaranteed crawl rate. The Basic Package is $14.50 / month and will most likely suit your needs.

BACKLINKSINDEXER.COM

BacklinksIndexer gets it’s links from Web 2.0 sites, micro blogs, social bookmarking and RSS as well as their own blogs on unique IP’s.

One of the things I really like about Backlinks Indexer is that it has an “Auto Restart” option (in the “My Settings” area of your Dashboard). Check this box and Backlinks Indexer will start again with the same links once it runs out of links in the queue. Handy – with this, you’re getting 2x the links to your backlinks if you don’t have new links to add, so you’re still getting your money’s worth with your subscription.

I also like that Backlinks Indexer gets links from a variety of sources.

Similar to Linklicious.me, you just paste in a list of your backlink URL’s and BacklinksIndexer will do the rest:

The Basic Package is $14.99/month and will create 20,000 backlinks to your backlinks every month, processing 50 URL’s you submit per day for a total of 1500 URL’s processed per month. They have larger packages should you need one.

OTHER

You can also look to Fiverr for backlinks-for-your-backlinks packages, here’s a job that could be modified to work for this link of link building. You could either ask the Fiverr supplier to switch the URL’s they’re building links to to cover all your backlinks, or you could just hire them to do this job for certain, higher quality backlinks.

For example, spending $5 to get 40,000 backlinks to your Squidoo page, which then links to your main URL could be worthwhile.

Spending $5 EACH to get links to EVERY SINGLE backlink your domain has – probably not a great idea. It’s too cost prohibitive and would leave quite a footprint by the time you’re done!

There are also tools like Scrapebox that’ll get low-level trackback, blog comments, etc. for your backlinks. It’s tempting to fall into the trap of spending $97 once rather than a monthly or per-link fee to another service provider…

Is your time best spent fiddling with spin tags and proxies in Scrapebox? Or would $14 per month one of the other services just eliminate your having to worry about building backlinks for your backlinks completely?

I don’t even have my outsourcers run Scrapebox-like software. Their time is better spent either building higher quality  backlinks that can’t be automated or monitoring campaigns from BacklinksIndexer / Linklicious, etc.

Here’s a Fiverr job that will get 15,000 blog comment backlinks using Scrapebox and you can use unlimited URL’s – so you can plug all the URL’s form your Webmaster Tools report in. Bam!

With Fiverr jobs like that, it’s just not worth your time to be messing around with software. You make and execute the master plan, you don’t want to get hung up in the trenches with details.

Best Practices for Building Backlinks To Backlinks

How do you choose what services to use?

I use Backlinks Indexer AND Linklicious together because they get links from different sources in different ways. A natural link profile has variety and I want that – even for my backlinks.

If you can only afford one service, I would choose BacklinksIndexer because it gets links from more sources – again, it’s a more natural looking profile. That being said, at the Basic Package, you’ll only be able to build backlinks to 1500 URL’s per month, so if you have a lot of backlinks in your Google Webmaster Tools reports, it’ll take a LOOOONG time to process those links.

That’s another reason I recommend adding Linklicious into the mix – to process more links per day.

For those mid to high quality backlinks we create, such as a Squidoo page, I will do a separate article submission linking to that Squidoo page, or a Fiverr job like those linked above linking to the Squidoo page – just to give the page an extra boost.

After the initial loading of my links into a service like Linklicious or BacklinksIndexer, how do I use the services in the future?

This needs to be a process – whenever new links are build for your sites, you add them to your Linklicious or Backlinks Indexer accounts.

If you submit an article to EzineArticles, add it’s URL. Some article marketing services provide a report of the URL’s your links were places at – if you use a service like this, buy all means, all those URL’s to your queues! Anywhere you build of find a link to your sites, add it to the service’s queue.

Another recommendation is to run ALL your backlinks through the systems every 6 months – download the reports from Google Webmaster Tools and feed them to the services. That way you’re getting Google’s most recent data input into your link-building workflow. Most of the URL’s will be the same (although some won’t be, and you want to catch those) – and that’s OK too, as you’ll just be giving them double the authority.

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By the end of today’s Reboot Your Blog, you will have:

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• Pulled your backlink data from Google Webmaster Tools
• Reviewed the available backlinks-for-backlinks services and decided which are right for you
• Added your backlinks to those services you’ll be using
• Set a process for you and/or outsourcers to add new backlinks to the service(s) when they’re obtained

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More link building goodness tomorrow!