Before we get started I should mention a couple of things.

• I do the below steps for medium competition keywords and sites – i.e. keywords that have Google competition in “” up to about 30-40k. Obviously with less competition you can skip or reduce some of the steps.
• I use some automated tools. It saves me A LOT of time (I’m talking of up to 95%!). It’s your choice whether you want to invest in the tools or do it manually. Time versus money.

As you may or may not know, getting ranked in the search engines require on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization information is widely available, so I am not going to go into that. Off-page optimization is getting backlinks and that is what I will show you with this post.

So here are my steps for getting backlinks to a newly launched site:

I submit my site to Bing. I have found that by doing this generally Bing index my site within 48 hours, something that has taken a long time previously. Just type in your website URL on Bing and if it is not already indexed they will give you an option to submit your site.

Social Bookmarking. I use Bookmarking Demon to submit my site to 100+ social bookmarking sites. I normally submit the home page and two other pages on the first day and then submit 2-3 pages every two days until all the pages of my site are submitted. Social bookmarking traffic is normally untargeted and most of the time won’t make you a lot of money, but it is an early boost in traffic.

Directory Submission. I use DirectoryBot to submit my home page to 500+ directories. Directory links might not carry as much weight now as they did previously, but it only takes me 2 minutes – well worth it. It goes without saying that this step will give you a lot of backlinks spread out over 2-3 months and although you will not receive any direct traffic, it will increase your search engine rankings over time.

I get two articles written at Articlez and create a Squidoo lens and a Hubpage. Not only does it give me two backlinks from authority sites, but they also earn me a little money directly from Squidoo and Hubpages.

Article marketing. My article marketing might seem complicated but it is actually quite simple. I first get 5 articles written at Articlez (or more or less depending on how big my site is). My signature at the bottom will have a link pointing to the home page and one other internal page. So with the 5 articles I will get 5 home page links and 5 links pointing to different internal pages. I then use these articles in the following way:

1. I submit them to Ezine Articles first and when approved I submit them manually to GoArticles and ArticlesBase. This will give you authority backlinks and also give you some traffic.
2. Next step is to use Automatic Article Submitter to submit the 5 articles to a ton of other article directories. Not for traffic, but backlinks. I generally submit 1 article a week.
3. The last step is to add these 5 articles to Article Marketing Automation. Make sure to rewrite the article at least 30% using their rewriter as it will be published on a lot more sites. Article Marketing Automation is great for getting in context links as I just move the links from the resource box to somewhere in the article itself – something a lot of article directories from upon.

That’s it!

Because I use software to automate the process plus I outsource the article writing all these steps except for the Article Marketing Automation bit only takes around 20 minutes! AMA takes another 50 minutes or so.

So let’s see what you get after all your submissions have been taken into account (which may take several months).

You get a 100 social bookmarks to each page plus more than 1,000 links to your home page and 1,000 links to 5 other pages. There are a lot of variables but even if you only get half that you should be able to destroy the competition!