Obtaining good quality backlinks without paying for them is becoming increasingly difficult. In this short post, I thought I’d share 3 link building tactics that have been working for me lately.

1. Hubpages: Hubpages is a community of articles, or “hubs” on various topics. Their unique system discourages spammers by slapping no-follow tags on outgoing links if your “hubscore” falls below 75. You can increase your hubscore by participating in forums, commenting on hubs, and most importantly, submitting high quality, completely original articles. It takes some work to maintain your hubscore, but the high quality links are worth the effort. I’ve seen some of my hubs picked up by Google in less than 2 hours.

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Tags: Article Marketing Internet Marketing Link Building Search Engine Marketing Web Marketing

I’ve spent hours scouring the web for the best article directory sites. After finding more than I knew what to do with, I wasted time submitting to most of them. As time wore on, I’ve come to realize there are really only a few that matter and that Google still likes. I’ve listed them below, along with my thoughts on each.

1. Buzzle: My personal favorite, Buzzle is the most SPAM free article directory, in my opinion. However, they are also the most difficult to get your articles into. They require you to submit previous work in order to be approved as an author.
2. EzineArticles: A very popular directory, EzineArticles is another great site, although the author admin is very buggy. They allow you to initially submit 10 articles, and then you must be reviewed again in order to continue submitting (which seems odd to more, but what heck)
3. IdeaMarketers: Offers instant article approval, as well as a generous number of backlinks allowed in the article text and author bio.
4. GoArticles: Not bad, articles are instantly approved. While the author bio only allows one link, you can put several in the body of the article.

Besides the sites listed above, I haven’t found any other worthy directories. Be sure to leave a comment if I’ve missed a good one.

As an SEO consultant, I’m always looking for new linking strategies. In this post, I’ll share my current favorite 3 sources of high quality backlinks.

1) Newsvine: Newsvine is well known as a news site similiar to Digg. However, some people don’t realize you can submit articles to Newsvine as well. The articles can contain html links, and they’re quickly crawled and indexed by Google.

2) Buzzle: While many article submission sites have fallen out of favor with the SE’s due to SPAM, the Buzzle article directory remains high quality. It is however, harder to become an approved article contributor. Since you’re required to submit previous work, don’t count on using Buzzle as your first article submission endeavor.

3) Squidoo: Relatively new to the social scene is Squidoo. Wikipedia explains the concept behind Squidoo, “Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses –single pages that highlights one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise.” A Squidoo lense is highly customizable, allowing you to add links, images, and more. If you network your lense properly, it will be crawled and indexed regularly.

Have any creative link building strategies of your own? Feel free to drop a comment.