How To: Increase Back Links With a WordPress Theme

If you have good design skills here is a tip that you can use to build hundreds, even thousands of new inbound links to your site. Build a Wordpress theme. For those of you who don’t know what a WordPress theme is, here is the definition from the Wordpress.org site…

Fundamentally, the WordPress Theme system is a way to "skin" your weblog. Yet, it is more than just a "skin." Skinning your site implies that only the design is changed. WordPress Themes can provide much more control over the look and presentation of the material on your website.

A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. These files are called template files. A theme modifies the way the site is displayed, without modifying the underlying software.

So now that you know what a WordPress theme is, you need to know how you can use it to increase your link popularity. There are a number of different directories that offer user-generated WordPress themes for download. The key is that by offering your theme for free you can request that anyone who chooses to download and use your theme has to leave a link to your site in the footer that gives you credit for the design. You decide the anchor text and the link is already in the theme, but I’d recommend not using spammy anchor text like "free Viagra" otherwise the people who download your theme will most likely remove the link.

Building themes for WordPress isn’t easy, so if you’re going to try this route make sure you have solid design and CSS skills. If youâre not a designer you could consider hiring someone to build it for you.

The one thing to keep in mind is that there are already thousands of free WordPress themes available for download, so make sure you have a really good design if you want to get a lot of downloads and backward links.

10 Reasons Why TLA and ReviewMe are Kicking Blogging Butt!

Readers, when a blogger comes up with a title and post like that I just got to link it up!

Donât Be a Link Nazi

A few months ago Cameron wrote a post about being a link Nazi and it seems that tons of people still don’t like linking out. By sharing the love and linking to others you will also get some link love back. If you want to pick up a fair amount of links add a blogroll and a handful of the sites you link to will link back. Or if you link to someone often within your posts, who knows they may link to you within their blogroll.

Have any of you seen an increase in your link popularity by linking to others?

Be Consistent With URLs

I’ve done a lot of SEO analysis reports over the years and I have to say that one of the most common mistakes that webmasters make is they fail to use consistent linking patterns within their sites. For example, they will link to their own homepage throughout the site using a combination of both http://www.url.com/ and http://www.url.com/index.html.

That’s just a small example of the problems I see as it’s often in many different forms, but the one thing that seems to remain consistent is that lots of webmasters fall into the trap of inconsistent internal linking. They don’t necessarily do it on purpose either, it’s just they don’t know why not to do this.

One URL isn’t favored over the other, but what is important is that you use the same URL consistently throughout the site. Otherwise you’re splitting your pagerank and backlinks between the two URLs, when having that all combined into one would make a much more powerful page.

If you’re already linking to your internal pages in this way then you need to fix it. The first thing you should do is add a 301 redirect to one of the URLs so it directs to the other. I would pick the page with the highest PR and the most backlinks to keep as the permanent URL. Once that 301 redirect is in place I would go through all the pages and update all the links.

How-to increase your links through a redesign

Like many of you, I love links and am always looking for new methods to build up my link popularity. For this reason every 6 months to a year I try to redesign my website using CSS and XHTML standards. By doing this I can then submit my website to CSS galleries such as CSS Vault, CSS Thesis, and  Stylegala.

Within the last year I had my personal blog showcased on 14 CSS galleries which has lead to 14 decent links considering that many of them are high in pagerank and rank highly on the search engines. So if you are looking for some extra links, do a redesign and submit your website to the following CSS galleries:

• CSS Drive
• CSS Mania
• CSS Vault
• CSS Elite
• CSS Demo
• CSS Import
• Style Gala
• Screenspire
• Styleboost
• Design Meltdown
• Dark Eye
• Unmatched Style
• Light on Dark
• CSS Remix
• W3C Sites
• Liquid Designs
• CSS Beauty
• Inspiration King
• Design Shack
• CSS Thesis
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