Backlink Your Way to the #1 Spot in the Search Engines
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.
The more backlinks you have referring to your website, the
more the search engines trust your content. In the original
Google algorithm, backlinks were a very important part of
the equation used to determine where your site was placed on
the search engine result pages (SERP's). In today's world,
the algorithm is much more complicated and the value of the
backlink has been diminished slightly from the original.
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.
Other terms for backlinks are incoming links, inlinks,
inbound links, and inward links.
Backlinks can be used for more than just SEO. You can judge
your website popularity (or spy on someone else's), find
what others are saying about your website and find all links
back to you (not in Google). Yahoo and MSN give you a much
better picture of what your backlinks are compared to Google
which only gives you a subset.
Google's reasoning for only showing a subset of the
backlinks that it knows about for your site is to protect
their search algorithm. Also remember that many times, the
page that has your backlink will not show it's true PR
because the page hasn't been through a Google PageRank
update yet.
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 Directories
2. Website Link Directories (some are paid and many are
free)
3. Comments in forums and blogs
4. Purchased links (currently frowned upon 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.
The wanted result of getting all these backlinks to your
site is to increase the natural search engine traffic that
is directed to your site by being on the first page of the
SERP's. But you should also see some traffic that comes to
your sites through the backlinks themselves. So, when
getting backlinks, you want to keep the reader in mind and
try to make it enticing for the reader to click your link
because there is something on the other end that they need.
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