Off-site promotion and link building is not what it has been just about couple of years ago. With the invention of new technologies, products, and services, link building and website promotion entered into a whole new world.

Good old days of only submitting an URL to search engines to get higher ranking are long gone. Now not only submitting to search engines will not get your site ranked at all, there is no need to submit to search engines either. What was considered as a must and crucial is now totally obsolete!

Reason no one needs to submit their site URL to search engines anymore is because search engines will find your site and index them by following the backlinks. Since link building is of outmost importance in off-site optimization and promotion, you will need to do it anyways. So why worry with such method that has no benefit at all anymore?

Just like search engine submission being out of date, few other site promotion and link building methods are out of date or not as effective as they have been once. Some of these useless methods are Web rings signups, FFA site submissions, guestbook comments, link exchanges, etc. Lots of people are still using link exchanges without realizing that Google will discount links gained from link exchanges. It is against Google Webmaster Guideline to exchange links just for the sake of passing PR or link juice and Google works hard to catch and penalize such practices.

So what to do now and how to promote? If you can’t get ranked anymore utilizing the methods that worked like charm once, where to turn to these days? The answer is Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 link building.

How many social bookmarking sites are out there as of this date is anyone’s guess but you can utilize these bookmarking sites to bookmark your site and inner pages. Since these social bookmarking sites are public, link added on them are seen by everyone as well as by search engine bots. You not only get backlinks from social bookmarking, you get traffic from social sites as well.

Article submission is another Web 2.0 link building method. Again, there are countless number of article directories out there where you can submit your article. You can add anchor text backlinks on the articles you submit which makes this method a great way to build some relevant contextual backlinks.

There are lots of social media and web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Flixya, Weebly, etc where you can publish your own articles and link back to your sites. Since lot of these Web 2.0 sites are high authority sites in the eyes of Google, you get very high quality contextual backlinks by utilizing this methods.

You can also utilize social networking sites like YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, etc as these sites are visited by millions of visitors each day. Just YouTube itself gets more traffic than Google. Get a simple video created and upload to YouTube. If you cannot do one with audio and video, you can setup a video using just images which will work just fine. If you can utilize the social and Web 2.0 sites properly, you will get stampede of traffic and plenty of backlinks to your site.

Author Bio: For more information on effective link building methods, visit the author’s Link Building Service site.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: link building,link building service,backlinks,seo,search engine optimization,social bookmarking,soci