It’s no secret it takes backlinks, and plenty of them to win competitive terms in the major search engines. Since the emphasis is on quality and humans, the search engine engineers developed an algorithm where their search spiders would read a page and then weigh the links on it according to its placement, relevancy and content around it.

Focusing on pagerank alone is foolish

Many webmasters only focus on the pagerank of the site, which is the visual indicator of its trust and backlink portfolio according to Google. It’s a great disservice however, not to understand the placement of the link can mean the difference between success and failure. Throughout the year’s header, footer and blogroll links have diminished in value, although they are still effective. The reasoning for this paradigm shift to in content links is because webmasters can easily perform link exchanges for header, footer, or sitewide links with little to no content surrounding them. Contextual backlinks however, possess all the qualities of a great backlink, wherein it goes naturally with the content, has related words around it, and is not as easily gamed by webmasters (although it can still happen).

Time to make the donuts…err contextual links

Creating contextual links through link building is a very real problem for thousands of webmasters but there are systems in place to do this effectively over and over again.  One of which is article marketing where you can post on quality sites such as this one, Snipsly, and embed a link in your content, or at the end in a resource box.

No cost free hosted web 2.0s to get started

Web 2.0s have exploded with popularity as well. Free blog hosting platforms such as Xanga, Livejournal, and Shutterfly are web destinations where you can submit your content, and embed as many links as you like (don’t overdo it), since moderation is less severe. It’s important to note they will delete your blog if you partake in nefarious acts such as content scraping, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, or link farm practices. It’s best to write quality, original works you are passionate about in order to leverage these sites effectively.

Private networks – good for bulk linking but more expensive

Some networks are off limits because they are used for personal sites, but many networks exist where you can sign up monthly and have access to their network. Many will only allow unique content and X amount of links, wherein others will allow spun content. The value of spun content is highly debated but in the end, quality unique original content is better for the internet, the reader, and the search engines to discern whom the creator of the piece, and where the credit should be bestowed.

Forums – most likely thread discussions

Discussions are usually content heavy but in order to ensure your link are posted in content be sure to have text before and after a signature link which is allowed by the forum. If not you can always post directly in the body, but this is typically frowned upon as self promotional unless your website is truly an authority or relevant to the topic you are discussing. Forum profile links can also be contextual although it’s more difficult to pull off; the key here is to put random spun words throughout the profile in hopes the search engines find them. Since these links are easy to get but hard to index many turn to services such as http://backlinksindexer.com in order to get these links found by Google, Bing, and Yahoo, otherwise they are typically meaningless.

Writing for Other Sites – Guest Blogging

If you exhaust all the other free options with article directories and web 2.0s (not really possible, but you may get bored of them), then you can seek out external sites related to your niche, or adjacent to it, and contact them to provide content for their readership. They will most likely accept if it’s quality, unique, and informative to their audience.

Hiring Services for Contextual link building

If all else fails and you have more money than time, or would simply like to streamline the process you can always purchase the service completely, or the content needed to embed your links within. You can hire article writers from webmaster forums, freelancer, elance, or craigslist. If you don’t want to deal with registering and submitting, even if the content is provided you can choose a 100% hands free solution with http://backlinksvault.com/homepage-contextual-backlinks/ where you can choose between permanent web 2.0 link building or even rented links across a large network of private websites. Most choose to use a permanent solution until they get a better understanding of their ROI, and net profits for their website; if applicable rented links could make you some serious income streams than their more long term permanent counterparts.

In the end it’s suggested to do a few yourself to understand the value, time, and process required for an effective link building campaign. While pagerank is a great indicator, and even stronger one is an editorial, trusted in post content anchor link.