Might not be as as powerful as they once were, but Wiki sites are still an outstanding way to gain valuable backlinks to your site.

In a web ruled by links it is essential that your domain has a range of topic related sources pointing back to your domain. One quick and relatively easy way to do this is to use Wiki sites to stream relevant traffic and build links (with appropriate anchor text).

What are Wiki Sites?

A Wiki is similar to a free encyclopaedia where you can create and edit pages on any given topic. Most Wiki’s allow communities to write documents collaboratively. The idea of a Wiki page is to involve users in an ongoing review of the content.

Top Sites

There are a whole range of Wiki sites floating on the web. If you’re really lucky you may be able to find some industry related Wiki’s to create pages on. Below are a list of tried and tested sites that can help build links back to your domain.

• http://www.aboutus.org

• http://www.bizwiki.co.uk

• http://en.wikipedia.org/

• http://www.wikispaces.com/

• http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/

• http://www.wikihow.com/

So how do you go about getting a link?

Become a Trusted Editor

If you’re going to make the smallest tweaks to any content you need to build up an account with a history of high quality edits. If you offer value to the community, you are more likely to get the privilege of linking to your own site.

Adding Links

Once you have built up an account with a reputable history you can look at adding some links (this doesn’t mean spamming a chosen category with tons of links!).

One of the best ways to get a link is to create a page on a topic related to your business. The page should include valuable, unique and high quality information. The most common way to include a link is behind a citation. For example, you may be writing about mountain bikes and mention a type of brand, this can then be linked to your appropriate page.

Internal Links

Another way to build up the quality of you backlinks is to implement a range of internal links from other appropriate Wiki pages. For example, if a link back to your site has five links from other Wiki pages this will increase the authority of the source.

Are they worth the hassle?

Many Wiki links are nofollowed (not that this matters in my opinion) – the links are picked up in most analysis kits including Google Webmaster Tools.  As with most quality links they have to be hard earned with good quality content.

Conclusion

Getting links from Wiki sites can be fairly straightforward if you provide valuable unique content. The more you can build up the trust of sites like Wikipedia the more you are likely to succeed. The other sites I mentioned are more lenient and are definitely worth incorporating into your link building strategy.