Friday, July 31, 2009

How to Get Backlinks to Boost Your Page Rank

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Backlinks are important for search engine optimization because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query. Backlinks are also called inward links, in links, inbound links or incoming links. Backlinks are the building block of good SEO.

Web designers and firms have been practicing this for years, outside of blogging. Website marketing is more dependent upon backlinks. Building backlinks however, can be a slow and tedious process every site owner and blogger has to face. When you are building a quality web-page, it’s important to build quality backlinks that are relevant to the theme of your site. Having your website, blog or Hub rank high with search engines is a key part to any online success, and backlinks are a crucial part of that success.

We constantly find information on the web telling you to “write quality content”, “get involved with social networking”, “and establish relationships with readers and other bloggers”. If you actively wish to increase the backlinks to your site and keep on the right side of Google, Yahoo and the other search engines, make sure you seek out the websites and blogs that complement your own website.

One of the very best methods of gaining backlinks is via the blogging community – when you read someone’s blog, you usually have the option to leave a comment. This is where you can leave a link to your website or blog for other people to check out – to really maximize this type of traffic, have your comment offer some kind of tip or advice on the preceding blog post.

Article marketing is known as the white-hat way to create these relevant, inbound links. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. Common ways to get backlinks include exchanging links with other sites (reciprocal links) and by placing articles you write in article directories and on other sites. Another excellent way to get links to your site is by writing articles for newsletters, which are then published on other people's sites.

To increase your knowledge on search engine optimization and backlinks, you an easily click on any SEO site which will explain the process, in detail, and how you can increase traffic to your website. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important).

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. Many pages concerned with search engine optimization have mechanisms to discover how many backlinks the web page or website has, so that the site owner can not only know the exact number of times that it has been backlinked, but where these backlinks are coming from, and if they are from related sources or not.

Backlinks are the backbone of good SEO, right up there with content and your TITLE and META tags. They are a great way to build your web presence and, are actually rated by the various search engines by keywords and the content of the backlinked sites. Using backlinks is a great search engine optimization technique though, as long as the backlinks are genuine and are not an attempt to fool the search engine algorithms. Ideally backlinks are web pages with high PageRank, with content like yours and that already link to other web pages.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are one of the most important aspects you need to consider when you're trying to build a higher ranking in the search engines. The search engines can perhaps find and index your site without backlinks, but without backing backlinks the search engines will never suggest your site to any of their visitors. Backlinks are essential for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because they help to judge the popularity and importance of the website based on their backlinks to other sites. Search engines use a number of standard criteria to rate sites on the web and backlinking is high on the list. Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website.

Backlinks are really just links to your site from another website. These links will direct users to your site whenever they click on it. Backlinks are not as of important as keyword sphere in MSN's point of perspective. Backlinks are basically incoming links to a particular website or web page. The more the number of backlinks a website or a web page possess, the more popular or important the website is.

Search engines consider one link on your site as one vote for you. Thus, with increased number of links, you get high number of votes and with more number of votes, your site rises in importance. Search engines, particularly Google use the number of incoming links as one measurement of the importance or ranking of the page. Other search engines tend to place less emphasis on the backlinks and more on other factors such as page content. Search engines can recognize quality link when they see one.

Google only updates PR every three months at best and during this time millions of new web pages are born that start off without any PR at all. When assessing your backlinks and you come across a page that appears to have a PR0 that has linked to you remember to check the PR of the home page because the subpage may have been created after the last Page Rank update and consequently won't show any numbers on the green PR bar. Google also gives new websites a waiting period of three to four months before giving it any kind of Page Rank. This is referred to as the "sandbox effect". Google search engine gives a lot of weight to backlinks that your site receives and the keywords that are used as anchor text in that link. Thats why Google's Page Rank exists, to collect the votes (links) for your site and give a score (the Page Rank score).

Links from other sites would need to be something that is relevant to you site. The absolute best type of links are backlinks or one way links to your website. Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. Link building (otherwise known as backlinks) are critical to driving guaranteed website traffic to you. Suddenly, you can get great surges in traffic and hopefully in revenue, if you have monetised your site.