While many people disapprove of buying backlinks from sellers on sites like SEOClerks or Fiverr, if used only as part of your overall backlink building strategy, paid links can give your search engine results a boost.

However, the best links, and the ones that Google would prefer a site to have, are naturally occurring links, because they are an indication of a website’s popularity and trustworthiness. In an ideal world, a website would be linked simply because of its high-quality content, but in reality, website owners need to be a bit more proactive in generating those links themselves.

If you have a website or blog and you want it to rank high on Google and other search engines, here are some of the ways you can generate more backlinks to your site.

Article Directories

Article directories are a great way to get permanent backlinks to your site, and they can also generate traffic. On the highest quality article sites, such as EzineArticles, you can place two backlinks per article. However, the articles published on these sites must be written correctly and cannot promote themselves too much.

Blog commenting

Posting comments on other people’s blogs is another easy option. Most blogs allow comments and in most of them you can add a URL, either to the comment itself or to your user profile. However, you will need to make your comments meaningful and useful, or they will simply be deleted as spam.

Participate in forums

By joining forums related to your website or blog’s niche, you will be able to leave comments on existing threads or start your own threads. You can usually add your website address to your forum profile, possibly include it in your profile signature, and sometimes use it in your comments. However, as with blog comments, you can’t spam a forum, or the moderators will remove your comments and possibly ban you from the site.

Guest blog posts

Guest posting to other people’s blogs will provide you with some more niche-specific links to your site. If you can provide useful and informative content that will be of interest to blog readers, the blog owner can publish a guest post that includes a link to your site.

Encourage the sharing of your content

Make sharing your content easy by adding share buttons to each post. If the platform you have used to develop your site does not have share buttons available, there are many free services that will provide you with a share button widget that you can add to your site. You can easily encourage more people to share your content by asking. Just leave a friendly reminder to share at the end of each post.

Social bookmarks

If you add your URLs to social bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon and Reddit, you will get valuable backlinks and traffic. To be accused of spamming, you will need to be seen to properly participate on the site, which will mean liking other people’s bookmarks and adding bookmarks from other sites besides your own.

These are just some of the ways that you can generate backlinks for your website and they are things that you can do on a regular basis. The best strategy is to spend an hour a day on SEO tasks and create more links. Unfortunately, it is an ongoing process that will take some time, but will ultimately improve your ranking on Google and other search engines.