Thursday, May 22, 2008

Backlinks Will Get Your Website To #1

By Anthony Stai

What's a backlink? A backlink is a URL link that is pointed towards your website and are very important to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. The backlinks from external sites can link to your home page or may link to internal pages within your website. Linking to internal pages is often referred to as "deep linking" and can help raise the importance of those internal pages in the eyes of the search engines.

In the world of backlinks, quantity is important. However, quality is also important. The more backlinks you have then the more the search engines trust your content. Google's more recent algorithm updates have included the importance of quality when referring to the page that the link is coming from. It used to be that you could go out and get 1000's of links and rise to number 1 in the search engine result pages (SERP's). But, that is no longer the case. Now you need to be more natural with your backlinking strategy.

Google uses the backlinks to calculate a value called PageRank (PR). Many SEO experts feel that the PR value isn't necessarily the most important factor for ranking high in the SERP's. There are so many factors that go into the algorithm that it has become very difficult to guess what Google is really looking at. However, we do know that backlinks have remained a constant over the years.

Additional terms for describing backlinks are: inlinks, inbound links, inward links, and incoming links. These terms are all used interchangeably.

Backlinks can be used for more than just PR calculation and SERP's. You can find related websites that have linked to you without your knowledge (or permission), gauge your sites popularity compared to another site, and view what others have written about your site/pages. While everyone always talks about getting links for Google SERP's placement, Yahoo gives a much better actual list of backlinks.

To hide the inner workings of the Google search engine algorithm, Google has refused to show you all of the sites that they know about that link to your site. Google will only show a partial list of those backlinks. Also remember that individual pages that have your backlink on them may not have the current PR calculated and may end up with a much higher PR during the next update.

If my site links to yours then I'm essentially giving you a vote for your site. It used to be (and in some search engines it still is) the only thing that was important to rank high. But, over time, the search engines have been forced to look at other factor due to website spam. The search engines are now looking at the context of the page the link is on and may be looking at the context of the page the link is pointing to. This is called page relevance.

Here are some various methods for generating backlinks to your site:

1. Web Link Directories

2. Articles Distribution

3. Comments in forums and blogs

4. Purchased links via link brokers (currently frowned on by Google)

5. Link Exchanges where you trade reciprocal links or multi-way links

Also don't just get backlinks from high PR pages. You want your backlinks to appear natural. So getting backlinks from lower PR pages as well as high PR pages is a more natural pattern.

What's the final result of your backlink efforts? More visitors to your site and if your site is selling something then hopefully more cash in your pocket. You should expect to get more visitors from the natural search engine results for keywords that you target as well as visitors that follow your backlinks from wherever they occur. Always try to make the backlink context be something that will invite the page visitor to click your backlink and visit your site.

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