Backlinks Explained

I am often asked:  What is a backlink? and Why should I care about them?

Backlinks are essential for a successful website, and when you are deciding how you will go about obtaining additional backlinks, you must consider the quality of the backlinks that you will obtain.

You want to make sure that the search engines give you full benefit for any backlinks which you obtain, so try to make sure that are all from high quality and/or relevant sources.

If you allocate time to obtaining quality backlinks, you will be rewarded with improved rankings in the search engine listings.

Take some time to implement a few of the following tips, and you should see the number of backlinks to your website increase.

The  Anchor Text In Your Links Should Be Keywords.
Always use your keywords in your backlinks. Never use something like “click here”. The text that the reader seeing in a backlink is usually referred to as the “anchor text”, and is a very powerful factor for SEO, and something you should consider very carefully. Try to work your link into the main text of your article, and try and make it grammatically correct, so that it looks as natural as can be. When assessing the quality of links pointing at your website, the search engines will give greater weight to links which are within the text of the article.

Submit To Link Directories
Submit your website to link directories that have lists of similar themed websites. Many website directories offer free inclusion, so they are a good source of backlinks. You can save time on the submission process by hiring a submission company, or by using submission software. Automated submission can be very effective and might actually save you a lot of time.

Use Article Submission
Write some useful articles which can then be submitted to article directories. Make sure that the articles contain at least one backlink to your website. Because the search engines give a higher precedence to one-way links, links from article directories will be quite valuable for your website. Although it sometimes takes more time to create quality content, you should invest the necessary time, as high quality content is much more valuable to your website than poor quality content.

Use A Blog For Backlinks
You can make posts to free blogs which you can get at sites such as Blogger and Wordpress. Take some of you quality articles and post these to your newly-acquired blogs, and remember to include links back to your website. Over time you will build a useful resource which will contain many useful posts, which can be used to link back to your websites. Always make sure that these are quality posts so they will not be discounted by the search engines.