Relaunched my 10 year old domain on a different web host using a completely different web editor (WordPress). Only difference is the site has 13,000 pages and 4,000 images. It’s an image licensing database. I already sent the sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools 5 weeks ago and all pages and images are indexed plus the redirects were taken care of prior to sitemap submission. Since the site is image based, I need advice regarding the best route for getting more backlinks…advice is appreciated. I have previously tried the dull, boring, tedious article submissions, getting into DMOZ and a pile of other directories and all the other tricks. However, if there is a better way I am not aware of, feel free to enlighten me…right now I don’t even have a page rank and my traffic is very very low. At one point in time, my old look with FrontPage 2002 (before the Penguin & Panda debacles) I had a #5 page rank!
There are a number of ways that pop into my head but 1 in particular is something I think would work instantly. Since you have so much content I am sure some of it is really “share worthy”.
Here’s what I’d do:
Leverage Facebook. Start a fan page for your site and start populating it with your best images (look into timing the posts properly based on your target audience). If possible, try to edit the images in a way that they become even more sharable. For example, if there’s a picture of someone standing on a mountain cliff gazing off into the sunset add some sort of caption or powerful quote under the image to make it inspirational. People love sharing inspirational stuff on FB.
Post at least 3-4 images a day at times when your target audience is online and active.
Leveraging FB will allow you to create a large following rather quickly. You can then funnel the traffic back to your website through links or to a landing page to capture emails.
The shares will give you social authority along with backlinks on autopilot. Take a look at how ViralNova does their stuff and you’ll have a good idea on how to go about it.
That’s a good idea as long as you don’t mind putting them into the “public domain”.
https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
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- Sharing Your Content and Information
You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:
-1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
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-4. When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).
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18. Definitions
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-7. By “use” we mean use, run, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of.
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Just watermark it well 
Great Searchnetics…appreciated! I do have this DORMANT page: <snip> but in all honesty never thought of FB as a valuable “tool” I also have a personal FB page but have not posted there in maybe half a year. That has about 4825 “friends” but really, when I post something there, RARELY does anyone share anything I post…so in essence, my belief in FB being any kind of “promotional” tool has lost it’s appeal with me. Then there is that set of “terms” they apply towards using your images.Yes, I do offer my images as low resolution image files along with embedding my URL or © onto various images I offer. I also Tweet heavily, even have that Twitter feed widget on the homepage which hasn’t resulted in much, nor has my G+ page…I think 24 “plussers” in my circles…sad, seems social media isn’t really the best promotional platform…I have even promoted my new site to Facebook “groups” and said share if you want…really, no one has respnded with much. One begins to wonder!
First advice is don’t opt for any paid links or to any link exchange programs. secondly you first have a detailed study and analysis of keywords and then do ON page optimization and then start with directory submission, blog commenting and forums. this will help you generate backlinks faster and also boost your keywords.
Viva: thanks. I used to make alot of directory submissions. It is one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks though…and many take time to verify what you submit, and others don’t even acknowledge receiving the submission. It caused me to lose faith in directories as a whole. My main site (in signatuire) is in Dmoz, but even now I hear that getting in Dmoz means nothing. I look at directories as potential harm. Why? because with some, you have to pay to get in…that being said, who’s not to say the the next big penalization by Google could be directories? In a sense, they are like link farms, are they not? Look what Google recently did to “guest blogging”…I mean, who’s next? I do appreciate your input though. I do offer a daily cartoon on my site (content) and it can be added using a code I supply interested web designers. What happens is when they add my code, I get an automatic backlink from their site to mine. They get quality humor, that auto-updates on it’s own, once every 24 hours. My only problem with this is that I need to find a way to get it well known. Not many are aware of this feature that I offer. My daily image appears on quite a few sites, and I would post links to those respective URLs on here to help you get a better idea, but I am not sure I would be violating the SitePoint terms, so I won’t. What I mean is, it’s nice to have dozens or hundreds of backlinks but truthfully you need many thousands of backlinks to get elevated and noticed by the bots…how to popularize what I offer is what I am looking in to.
My suggestion is SMO would be a good oppurtunity and it is interesting too. So why not have hand of try in it.
With the current image database, you could probably create attractive blog posts. You can post about your services in thousands of social media sites. It results in people who are impressed, land on you page. As a result, your site would get good number of quality audience.
There are lots of success stories of businesses who use SMO for their marketing.
Good luck !
Doing Article is really an old idea, You have focus on content based promotion like guest blogging, guest posting and other content based promotion. also you can use facebook, pinterest image promotion and other social sharing.
To generate backlinks, social media is a good option. Social networks are good for promotion of your website. Search engine optimization techniques as guest blogging, forum posting, social bookmarking, blog commenting, video submission etc. are used to get good backlinks. Don’t focus on quantity of backlinks follow rules and regulation and create quality backlinks.
None of these techniques will be much help in obtaining good backlinks. Any link which you can easily place for yourself is given little or no weight by the search engines.
In addition, any reputable forum or blog will mark external links as “nofollow”, making them worthless as backlinks. They may help to drive traffic, if your contributions are particularly helpful, but that’s not the question here.
Link dropping on forums and blogs is more likely to get you banned from those sites than to get you backlinks.
You must use social media and photo sharing sites to highlight and index your site. There are many free image sharing site available that helps you.