There are a lot of ways how to build backlinks – through social bookmarking sites, guest writing, commenting, just being helpful and seen all around your community, but we wanted to drop down it to sections and give you a hand to help building your backlinks right now.

We will start with the most well known things and topics, but at the end of the article check out other resources – you will find a lot of useful tools and big SEO building lists there to help you out! Enjoy!

Bookmarking Services

1. Diigo

Diigo provides a browser add-on that can really improve your research productivity. As you read on the web, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you. You can also attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages. Unlike most other web “highlighters” that merely clip, Diigo highlights and sticky notes are persistent in the sense that whenever you return to the original web page, you will see your highlights and sticky notes superimposed on the original page, just what you would expect if you highlighted or wrote on a book!

Moreover, all the information — highlighted paragraphs, sticky notes, and the original url — are saved on Diigo servers, creating your personal digest of the web, your own collection of highlights from the web – ones that are meaningful to you! You can easily search, access, sort and share this collection from any PC or even iPhone.

2. Delicious

Delicious is a bookmarking service that is being provided by Yahoo! Inc.

This is my favorite bookmarking service that I am using almost everyday, almost every time when I’m writing some article.

3. Mister Wong

Mister Wong is bookmarking service where you can:

• search and find the best sites on the web
• save and manage your favorite websites
• access your online account wherever you are
• connect with twitter and automatically import interesting links

4. Simply

Simpy is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private.

Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc.

• Simpy is 100% FREE!
• Registered users see NO ADVERTISEMENTS!
• Access your bookmarks from any computer and any browser – home, work, school…
• Save and Tag pages with a single click via a bookmarklet or browser extension (Firefox)
• Choose between private or public (shared) bookmarks
• Full-text Search bookmarked pages” content, not just meta-data
• Attach searchable notes to bookmarks
• Create private or public Groups, invite others, collaborate
• Find people like you and subscribe to their bookmarks
• Share your bookmarks with others
• Detect broken, forgotten and even redirected bookmarks
• Upload your existing bookmarks (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Galeon and Konqueror supported); Sync with del.icio.us; Export your bookmarks
• Save private, taggable, and searchable free-text Notes
• For hackers: Simpy has an open REST API – use it!
• For bloggers: Publish your bookmarks in your blog using RSS

Digg-Like sites

1. DesignBump

DesignBump is a very useful site for design related bloggers to get traffic. Bloggers post links and make them popular.

2. Digg

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won't find editors at Digg — they are here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and they are changing the way people consume information online.

3. DesignFloat

Very similar site to Digg, but the only difference is that this page is only about design. It says “Welcome to DesignFloat.com the number one design related stories sharing resource”.

4. Sphinn

Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.

5. Pixel Groovy

It says “Pixel Groovy is a user controlled tutorial directory. We provide the members with the control, not editors, to decide which tutorials are worthy of being published and which tutorials aren’t. This helps filter out and set a level of quality in the tutorials seen on the frontpage”.

6. Dig A List

DigaList helps you dig out your lists to share, cobuild with friends (or thousands people) or Discover awesome lists.

7. CSS Globe

Css Globe is a community news site where members can publish news about web standards, css, web design and web development.

8. DZone

DZone is a technology publishing company that produces valuable content for software architects and developers worldwide.

9. … and a lot of other sites you are able to see here

DoFollow Sites.. Where to share your link.. Like Twitter and Facebook!

1. Twitter

2. Facebook

3. Stumbleupon

4. Reddit

5. Mixx

6. Technorati

7. Google Buzz

List of tips how to gain more traffic

1. SEO

The first and the main thing to your blog is to choose the best CMS for SEO or create one by yourself (but don’t do that – that’s so hard to do all perfectly). For example if you have Wordpress, then design you choose must be optimized for SEO too.

More SEO links:

20 Most Valuable SEO Plugins For WordPress

Setting Up Wordpress for SEO

10 Important Tips to Optimize Wordpress for Search Engines

Understanding SEO Importance for Your Website Productivity

2. Articles: Write every day and write interesting articles

Articles must be interesting and at all unique. Write something that none has never done.

3. Share your work, share links

I already added some sites above where to share your work – use it, you will be happy.

4. Run contests

People always like contests,you give a chance to them to test their skills. If you post your work and  you win, than some other persons that can offer you some work, probably will do so, because you already proven your skills in some way by standing out.

5. Comment on other sites / blogs

If you comment his work, he will probably do the same back to you too. And that one of ways  for SEO too – more links from other sites to yours.

6. Have a great design / layout

7. Get your own domain

8. Activate guest blogging

9. Reply to comments

10. Link exchange with other blogs

Very useful tools and sites:

• Backlinks Checker Tool – See all sites where are backlink to your site.
• SEO PowerSuite – Turn your website into an unshakable search engine leader with the only world-standard SEO software. (See video)
• Knowem – Allows you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 400 popular and emerging social media websites.
• Link Exchange Directory – Gain only one-way inbound links.
• Kwmap – A keyword map for the whole internet.
• Google Adwords – Shows similar and searched keywords.
• Keyword density check – This tool parse the most frequently keyword of a website and calculates his percentage share.
• KeywordDifficultyTool – Get data on any keyword term / phrase including Keyword Difficulty scores & Google AdWords search volume.
• SEO for Firefox – Pulls useful market research data right into Google’s and Yahoo!’s search results.
• Keyword Suggestion Tools – Helps to choose right keywords to your site.
• Ontology Finder – Find similar keywords.
• Link popularity checker – The Link Popularity Checker tells you how many websites are linking to yours.
• Alexa Ranks – Alexa page rank.
• Raven Internet Marketing Tools – Manage your SEO and Social Media, Research and track keywords and competitors.
• Backlink Builder – Building quality backlinks.
• Linkvalue and Linkprice calculator – The linkprice calculator reckon the link value per month of a entered website. This link value is calculated from many search engines important factors.
• Check Google Page Rank – Check Google page rank of any web page.
• Rank Checker – Rank checking tool allows you to check your rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live search results.
• URL rewriting tool – Rewrites ugly url to SEO friendly.
• Title And Meta Tags Generator – Helps to choose title and meta tags.
• Different Data Page Rank – With the Multi PageRank Check you can check the PageRank from different google data centers.
• Google Gadgets – These allow you to make SEO tools conveniently available anywhere.
• … and a big list of other SEO tools,
• … and here too.

SketchPad is a free WordPress 3.0 ready theme that’s ready to fuel your magazine or social blog style website.  With 10 vivid colors options, you’re sure to suit the style of your blog.  100% Valid XHTML and CODE ensure that you’re website will be cross browser compatible and up to standards.  Thumbnails are easily applied using the standard WordPress “Post Thumbnail” or “Featured Image” built in functionality.  Turn your blog into an attractive, easy to use, and functional website with SketchPad from ThemeSheep.

SketchPad is released under the GPL V2 license specifically for 1stwebdesigner, so you’re free from restrictions on how you use it!  Feel free to use it for any personal or commercial websites.  Just remember to share, tweet, link, and comment on this article to help support this free WordPress theme!

Features of SketchPad

• 10 Awesome Color Schemes
• WordPress 3.0 Custom Menu Implementation
• 4 Widgetized Footer Areas
• Custom Ad Management Widget
• ThemeSheep Admin Options
• Custom Home Page Post Layout Options
• “Latest Tweet” Header Option (can disable from admin options)
• Integrated Page Navigation
• Automatic Thumbnail Integration, set it and forget it!
• Set your own custom logo easily
• Input your Analytics or other tracking code through admin options
• Bread crumb navigation
• “Related Posts” custom feature

DEMO

DOWNLOAD

DETAILS PAGE

10 Awesome Color Schemes to Choose From

Easily change the look of your website through the ThemeSheep admin options page.  Just select the color that you like, hit “save options” and you’re blog is instantly changed to the color of your choice.

Custom Post Layout Options

Through our admin options, you can easily select whether to display all large full width posts (as you see in the demo) or small half page width posts.  You can even mix these layouts up and do “X” amount of large, and “X” amount of small posts!  You’re in control of how your posts are displayed to your readers.

Custom Author Box and Post Excerpt Captions

Out of the box, SketchPad will create an “Author Box” in every one of your blog posts.  This author box will use the authors email Gravatar as the image, use the author’s name as a link to their posts, and use the “BIO” information that an author can fill out in their WordPress profile page.  Another neat feature is the custom excerpt caption.  This area is directly beside the main posts thumbnail and will first display the “excerpt” field ( you have to fill the excerpt field out whilst creating a new post ), if no excerpt variable exists, it takes the first 150 characters from your content to display.  This is a great way to give visitors a quick summary on the article and the author, capturing their interest and increasing reader loyalty.

Details Page

SketchPad is available for free download, or if you’d like to work from the PSD’s, the developer package is available for $22 USD.  Both are available on our details page

Demo Page

A full featured demo is up for your viewing pleasure.  You can preview every color options as well as check out all the features of the theme on the demo page

Download SketchPad

SketchPad.zip (ZIP file 245kb)