Backlinks Will Get Your Website To #1 | Site Promotion

By AnthonyStai
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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.

The Google search engine uses a calculated value called PageRank (PR) that is based on the number of backlinks to your site. SEO gurus have downplayed the importance of the PageRank value when calculating the placement in the SERP's. The ranking algorithm has literally hundreds of factors that all have different impact on the calculation. It is almost impossible to guess all of the factors and how they affect ranking. One thing has remained pretty constant over time and that is backlinks.

You may also hear backlinks referred to as inbound links, inward links, incoming links, or inlinks. All of these terms are synonymous with each other.

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.

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.

When another site links to your site, they are basically voting for yours. But that vote is no longer the only thing looked at. The major search engines are also looking at the content and context of the link to determine relevance to your website. If the page containing the backlink has little to no relevance than the link will not be weighted as heavily when the link is counted.

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

1. Web Directories

2. Article Sites like ezinearticles.com

3. Adding meaning full comments to related forums and blogs

4. Buying home page or site wide links - not recommended unless it is in context

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

Tip: Don't just worry about getting backlinks from high PR sites. A natural pattern of link gathering would be to have more links from lower PR sites because of their sheer quantity when compared to high PR sites.

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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