You can find the previous three episodes here:

• Part I: Guest posting and theme distribution
• Part II: Crowdsourcing (running a contest) and directory submissions
• Part III: Social bookmarking and forum posting

This article will show you a few insights on how to use Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a popular service where people ask questions (and get answers) on various topics. Once you have answered a few questions and got a certain point threshold, your account is allowed to post “live” links, which is what you will be looking for.

• Difficulty: hard. If it’s not your area of expertise, you may have a hard time researching the topic and providing quality replies that will actually help people rather than solely promote your link.
• Time: Quite a lot. It takes time to reach Level 2 where you can post clickable links, otherwise your answers won’t carry any SEO benefit.
• Quality: High. All search engines regard Yahoo Answers as a high authority site, so a link from there can make a big impact.

Be reminded that it’s against Yahoo’s terms of service to reply to your own questions using multiple accounts. It is considered spam and your accounts will be blocked. Yahoo takes spamming very seriously and there are lots of reports where genuine accounts are flagged, which is one of the reasons you shouldn't be spending all of your time building links with Yahoo Answers.

Yahoo Answers is also known as a good way of providing decent amounts of traffic. The pages where your links are posted get consistent organic traffic, so if your answer is chosen as the most relevant one, whoever searched for that question will likely be visiting your link.

Offline networking

Face to face meet-ups can help you build up your backlinks profile. Trade conferences can be a great way of networking with people in your industry and acquiring one-way links.

• Difficulty: hard. You will have to get out of the office, which can be quite scary!  Jokes aside, networking with other people in your area of expertise isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Inter-personal skills should prevail here.
• Time consumed: A lot. You may need to work  for weeks or more to get under someone’s skin enough to have them write an article on your product or service.
• Quality: A+. These are the kind of links you should be looking for. Relevant, contextual links that look natural.

Always aim at one-way links when networking with people offline. After all, you will be putting in a lot of time (you can probably build hundreds of social bookmarks in the time it takes you to attend a conference), so don’t settle for anything less. Reciprocal links are a dime a dozen, you should be getting something better.