How to Get Quality Free Backlinks

As a webmaster, one of the most important factors that can have a strong effect on your website rankings in search engines is the backlinks pointing to it. Link building and earning website authority are among the most challenging webmaster activities. Still, building good backlinks can be as simple as building and maintaining good habits. Keep reading to find out how.This article does not talk about old techniques of getting links, such as reciprocal link exchange, social bookmarking, article submission, submitting links to directories, 3-way link exchange, forum posting and blog commenting. Rather, we'll examine webmaster habits, and how these habits can be used to get quality free links to your site. Some of this are not SEO techniques at all, but important habits that a webmaster must have to earn quality links for his/her website. The habits are not listed in order of importance.
Habit #1: Networking with other webmasters in the same niche
Some webmasters have a habit of networking with other webmasters. They do that for both personal and business reasons. During this process, links can be earned in a variety of ways. Other webmasters visit your website and may find an interesting topic to link to, for instance. While networking, you may discuss some of the articles on your website with a fellow webmaster; if this sparks some interest, the other webmaster will link to it and share it with his/her friends.
Further, if you've been doing this for a while and are considered an authority in your niche, you can get a lot of followers from other, fellow webmasters. In this case, you can get a lot of links because they will list your website in their blogroll or cite it in their articles.
So how are you going to acquire this helpful habit?
First, you need to socialize and be eager to meet new people. Do not do it for the sake of links; do it because you need someone that has the same interest as you, which both of you can discuss and perhaps even collaborate on articles or other projects.
You will learn a lot from these relationships. They also expose your level of skill and expertise.
You can socialize online by participating on certain kinds of websites. These include:

• Forums about your niche. For example, if you have an SEO-related website, or if you're interested in learning SEO, you can join and contribute to forums.seochat.com.
  
• Website communities about bloggers. A good example is blogcatalog.com, where you can submit your blog, meet some new contacts, and discuss areas of interest.
  
• Popular social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. These sites offer a lot of opportunities to meet new contacts and discuss similar interests.
  
  Currently, you can earn backlinks in Facebook and Google Profiles by putting your website in one of those fields in your profile. These links are crawlable and indexable.
  
  Of course, it would be advisable to put a strong effort into making your website as good as possible, so that visitors coming from that link become interested in your expertise and will most likely network with you.
  
• Networking websites such as Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/), where you can participate in related discussion groups.

In summary, this habit can get you free backlinks because your contacts will link to you for editorial reasons. These are also quality links, because they are both coming from related websites and editorially given. Keep developing and nurturing your website contacts. One good way is to maintain a contact list in a spreadsheet with their URLs, so that you will remember their website, subscribe to their feeds and interact with their content. You can also share what news you have in your website.
Habit #2: Answering commenter questions seriously
This habit is rare. If you read popular blogs, you'll notice that there are only a few of them that answer the commenters' questions seriously and in detail. This is particularly  important if the person commenting on your article/post is asking some technical questions that need technical details.
Here are some good tips on how to transform this opportunity into a good link bait strategy:

1. Moderate comments on your blog.
   
2. Look for the commenters that are asking detailed/specific questions about your post and have received no replies. The answer to this question is either not found in your article or not clearly elaborated.
   
3. Write a very detailed answer to his/her question by publishing it in a separate article. You can write a reply around 500 words or more, depending on the complexity of the topic.
   
4. Let the asker know you have answered the question either by replying to his/her comment or sending an email.
   
5. In most cases, the asker will be glad of your help and will either link to it, bookmark it or even share it with other friends.

Most likely, if the asker is also a webmaster with related websites or another blogger, you will be surprised to find that you can earn a link by featuring your detailed answer in one of his/her blog posts or resource page.
Not only you can earn a link from this technique, but you can also help your website to grow by adding more quality and useful content.