Link building is the toughest part of SEO. No kidding, It can take you years to grow link mass “the natural way”, unless you’re some kind of a genius or a natural born viral marketer.  But do not fear, there are some relatively easy ways to build a massive amount of  links to your site. And forget about ethics, if you don’t want to – this post is not for you :P

Wordpress themes.

This is kind of old and dirty in some way. You make a theme and put your credit in the footer and probably some other parts of the template. But you have to be a WP coder to make those, and most of us are not, so there’s an easier solution. Take some free (or premium, depends on your ethics) themes, compile them in a pack, add your links to them and, well, upload them to torrent trackers. There’s a neat trick, most people who use Wordpress don’t even know simple html, so most of your links won’t get removed. But, there’s also a lot of people that know html and don’t know anything about PHP obfuscation :) Just take the whole template file (if the links are in the footer it’ll be footer.php) and obfuscate it. You can also encode your php code with Zend or Ioncube, but it might not be compatible with some webhostings. People will either break their theme by removing the obfuscated code, start using another theme, or will just leave the links where they are. Oh and don’t put your Adsense in the themes, your account might get banned ;)

Splogs.

Automated blogs. Stolen or generated content. It’s also a rather simple way to get links and if you get good at it – to get profit. It’s basically about:

1. Install Wordpress.
2. Configure it (more on that later)
3. Aggregate content.
4. Rinse and repeat xxx times.
5. Link the splogs together (optional) and make links to the acceptor website.
6. Enjoy and drink beer.

Ha, it’s really not that simple. First of all, you’ll need lots of them, meaning you have to automate the process to make it time worthy. When you aggregate content from other blogs – bloggers will write abuses to your hoster for stealing content and your accounts will be deactivated. Then there’s this duplicate content penalty from google, supplemental index, etc. But do not fear, my friend!

Wordpress splog configuration:

Themes: don’t really matter, you can use the default one.

Plugins: basic SEO stuff like All-in-one-SEO-pack, seo-pager, WP-breadcrumbs, Canonical Urls etc. (I’ll soon make one of my WP-splog builds public, so stay tuned ;). + Plugins for aggregating content. Wp-o-Matic does a good job, and it’s free! Caffeinated content parses Yahoo! Answers by given keywords and wonderfully solves the problem of duplicate content and, uhm, content aggregation and abuses. To avoid abuses  use an abuse-free hosting. To make content unique synonymize  it! There are some plugins that let you aggregate content and synonimize it on the fly. Snap. Oh, and remember, that splogs must, at least, pay for themselves (domain and hosting).  Adsense will do the job most of the time, but in some niches you might even try to monetize splogs with affiliate marketing.

Buying links.

The good old way, which is not that good anymore.

Sign up at Text Link Ads as an advertiser, find sites in your niche, generate anchor texts with your keywords and, well, place your links on these sites. The price that you’ll have to pay to rank high in SERPS depends on your keywordsm and the price of the links depends on the PR of the link selling site. 

There’s also a neat service from Fantomaster – 10 links a day for those of you who value their time, or are just plain lazy ;)

• Links are absolutely under your own control in terms of article content, anchor text and deep linking.
• Links are entirely one way – i.e. requiring no reciprocation.
• Links are distributed intelligently across a wide network of independent, topical web sites in an organic, randomized manner without creating a discernible pattern that could get you penalized for artificial or paid linking.
• Links that don’t take ages to build via humiliating begging e-mails all recipients despise and rate as spam.
• Links that are eminently affordable, without pulverising your overall ROI.
• Links, moreover, that are regularly monitored, maintained and distributed across a vast, steadily expanding network by 100% competetent people who truly know their business.
• All your articles are submitted via one central interface – no need to sign up and login manually with hundreds of blogs every time to publish your promotional material.
• Bulk submission (Premium Accounts only), enabling you to process your articles offline from the comfort of your office: upload and forget – our system will do the rest, leaving your hands and resources free to focus on your core business!
• To safeguard the integrity of the network, no adult content, no warez, no hate sites, no illegal stuff admitted!

Hope you enjoyed the post, good luck in this tough online biz ;)