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Even with today’s search engines, link building is as important as ever.  However, any good SEO knows that link building can be a time consuming, often fruitless process.

Though, there is a way that you could build links from highly popular sites and even those closely related to you given the right circumstances.

In this article I explain how this is accomplished.

This type of link building really isn’t new and it may not work for some sites, but it is effective overall and will provide you with one more source of potential links.  I know it’s effective because I’ve done it for my own personal sites and it has worked wonders.

I recently wrote an article about the SEO benefits of Wiki, and it was during my research of this software that it hit me:  Wiki link building.  You’ve probably heard of it before, but not like this.

Let’s start with the obvious:  Wikipedia.  You’ve likely heard how you can use popular services like Wikipedia to submit your site via their page editor where all you need to do is find the appropriate page, edit it and add your link.  I’ve done this and it does work well, provided you have a relevant site and find a good place to link from.

This is why you start with Wikipedia.  With a couple simple searches I was able to find three or four pages with high link popularity and good PageRank (fours, fives and sixes).  I didn’t want to be greedy so I picked a single page with the highest PageRank that was the most relevant to my site and added a link to it.

But, you must also keep in mind that there are editors for Wikipedia so there is no guarantee that your link will continue to exist.  Link spamming has been an issue for Wikipedia in the past, therefore one must be extremely careful when adding your link.

Your link should provide additional details to the page of information provided.  In other words, if you write an industry blog then perhaps link to that instead of your main site.

Step one of this link building plan is to submit to Wikipedia. Similarly you should find other authoritative general purpose Wiki sites.  Simply perform a search for sites related to Wikipedia (using this query in Google, for example:  related:wikipedia.org) and browse those sites to see if there are similar places where you can submit your link.

Again, use the same criteria as above, if you find something relevant only submit links which are of a useful nature.  The best way to get your link to stick is if you offer something supplementary (such as a news of information blog) that the reader won’t get from the Wiki.

But wait, that’s not all.  Sure you’ve hit the more popular Wiki sites, but did you know there are literally thousands of other more you could submit links to?  And some of these sites are your competitors, suppliers, customers and so on?  In other words, highly relevant to you.

What I found as I was researching both the previous article and this one is that many sites are beginning to adopt Wiki’s as a way of not only building out their site, but also providing their customers with an easy to use, searchable knowledgebase.

It is on these other Wiki’s where you can get a large number of links with little effort.  And here is how you do it:

If you go to Google and perform a search for your important key phrases, surrounded by quotes and appended with Inurl:wiki, you will find those sites which have wikis related to your keywords.

Pretty simple huh?

For example, if I search for "search engine marketing” inurl:wiki in Google I get 356 results.

Granted, some of these aren’t relevant, but a quick scan of the top 20 results shows me that about half of the sites listed are related to SEM in general.

Upon reviewing these sites I have found that many require a free account to log in and edit, while some are more open, much like Wikipedia.

That means that within probably an hour I can build between 4 and 8 links to this site from these related sites!  How much more relevant can those links be?

If you combine these half dozen or so links with the highly popular Wikipedia and other wiki links you’ve created in the first step, you’ve now just increased your link popularity by as much as 10 or more new links in the span of one hour!

As with Wikipedia, there is no guarantee that these links will stay there.  If the owners of the competitor Wiki’s are smart, they will be monitoring changes and could remove some of those links.  But there are going to be some sites where the owners don’t moderate changes.  Therefore, your links will remain and you will get credit for them.

And of course you won’t want to stop at the top 10 or 20.  I’d recommend doing at least the top 50, and then starting a new search for your next most important key phrase.  In the end, you could have built dozens of links from other relevant sites whose link popularity will continue to grow over time, thereby inflating your link popularity.

And just so you know, when I added the link from Wikipedia to my site I noticed it in a backlink check on Google within about 6 days. Similarly it appeared in MSN and Yahoo within a couple of weeks.  I check back every couple of weeks or so to ensure that it is still there, and it is, so I’m pretty sure that it will remain.

The longer it remains, the more valuable it will be to me because as more and more people link to that Wikipedia page, or the Wikipedia site in general, that link becomes worth more to me.  The link popularity of that page goes up and some of that increased link popularity transfers to my site, thereby increasing my link popularity naturally without my having to do anything.

So, if you are looking for a new link building tactic, why not add this one to the arsenal?

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.