When it comes to ranking well in search engines, it requires two things – good on page SEO and good off page SEO. I am going to cover some free off page link building methods to increase your website search engine rankings.

Valuable back links are links that are do-follow. These are set within a website by the web master to tell the search engines to follow the links placed on the website. These do-follow links pass rank value to the site it is linking to. I use a firefox plugin called SEO for Firefox (how original, right?) in order to quickly tell if a link is a do follow or no follow link. Links that are no-follow are highlighted in red. If the website you want to place your link on has all no follow links, you might be better off looking for another website for your free back links.

Do-follow blogs.

Do follow blogs allow users to post a comment and include a link back to his/her website. A no-follow blog will allow you to do the same, but the difference is that do-follow passes rank value while no-follow does not. There are a couple websites that will list the do-follow blogs out there – here is one good one http://linkbuildingbible.com/dofollowdiver/

When commenting on these blogs, make sure to actually read the post and leave a valuable comment. Not just some junk you type in there just to get a backlink. The blog owner is more likely to approve a good comment than a 10 second SPAM comment. A good comment should be atleast 3 sentences or more.

Do follow forums

The great thing about do-follow forums is that it is very easy to gain a large number of backlinks in little time. Although forum backlinks aren’t as valuable as other methods, they are still useful to gain some extra search ranking boosts. To get the most out of these links, you should join a do-follow forum related to the niche of your website. For instance, if you ran a web hosting website, you would search Google for web hosting forums. These links will be highly relevant to your website so its definitely worth grabbing as many as you can. After you register with the forum, set up your signature to display links to your website and its inner pages. Most forums allow 2-4 links per signature.

One extra bonus in being active on these do-follow forums is that you will gain some good traffic from these forums if you write GOOD threads and replies. The higher quality the posts, the more someone will be enticed to visit the website of the knowledgeable poster.