Optimizing your website content just isn’t enough any more when it comes to getting ranking in the search engines. Getting other websites to link to yours is known as as backlinks. The sad fact is Google won’t bother listing your site if it has no backlinks.
Your off site seo promotion should focus on getting quality backlinks that are relevant to your website theme or keywords. This will aide the search engines in ranking the value of your site and what your site is about. Backlinks tell the search engines the popularity of your site. The more inbound links you have, the greater its link popularity. Google’s page rank is complex and takes many factors into consideration.
It’s not just important to have back links. It’s important to have QUALITY back links. If a site with a high ranking links to your site, it will have more weight than a thousand spammy poor sites with links to yours (those might even get you slapped and banned by Google). It’s not a good idea to buy links from sites that promise to send you a huge amount of traffic. This will hurt you more than help your website popularity. So try to avoid participation in organized link exchanges or link farms. The search engines see this as manipulation of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and will penalize your website. Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as it warns of the “Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging” which is considered a violation of Google’s TOS.
Good one way links to your site will get you ranked quicker than reciprocal links you might get from participating in link exchanges. You want backlinks from other sites that have similar or related topics. You want those backlinks to point to the most relevant page on your site, not simply the homepage. This is known as “deep linking”. Preferably the links should have one of your keywords in the anchor text of the link. Targeted keywords in the anchor text make good backlinks and carry a lot of weight with the search engines.
Be careful not to build backlinks too rapidly. If you try to build a huge amount of backlinks in a short period of time, the search engines will think you are doing something wrong. Instead grow your links steadily over time. Request reciprocal links from other webmasters with similar topics as yours.
8. Links from high PR sites are good, but don’t obsess about getting them. You’ll often get as much value from a highly targeted low PR link as from an untargeted high PR one. The search engines aren’t the only reason to have links, and good links bring traffic themselves. Having said that, if you’re on a link building campaign, unless a site looks particularly good, I wouldn’t bother targeting it if it has no PR, e.i., is PR0.
Backlinks are so effective that you can actually get your website noticed and ranked by the search engines without submitting your site to them. If you get quality backlinks from websites that Google or Yahoo already have ranked as valuable sites and are crawled regularly, then they will discover your site naturally.
There are valid tools that can help you get quality back links. Tools like SEOelite, WebCEO or Link Assist are great to use for this. But you can also help your backlinks by listing your site in directories under categories that are specific to your website content. Also effective is writing and submitting articles that link back to your site and have topics that pertain to your content. And don’t forget about the Social Sites such as Digg, Technorati, Squidoo and other bookmark sites. Another good idea is to post on forums and include a link to your site in your signature. But be sure not to spam the forums.
Getting quality backlinks are essential to search engine optimization. To rank well with the search engines you will need to spend a lot of time getting quality backlinks, or spend a little money and use SEOelite, WebCEO or Link Assist.
Tags: Backlinks
