Posted by The first thing you need to know is that backlinks are a very good thing as far as getting noticed on the Internet goes. Its probably best to start with the basics and try to understand What we are talking about when we refer to a backlink. Keep reading and you’ll find out all about them and how they can be useful to you.
Backlink Basics
To put it in the simplest terms, backlinks are links from other websites and blogs back to your website. They increase your visibility on the web and also make the search engines love you. It sounds easy, but don’t be fooled: getting links can take quite a bit of time and effort!
Now, did I mention the spiders and bots? They work on behalf of the search engines. These technological marvels crawl not just content but also inbound links (backlinks) to your website. So, you’d probably figure that you can go to every website you can and post a link back to your site, wouldn’t you? This isn’t such a great idea.
Here’s why. Those bots are pretty smart creatures; they can even evaluate the types of backlinks you get. Ok, so let’s imagine that you are just beginning your online adventures and are trying to establish yourself. You could go to other sites and ask to exchange links with them for free; some are more than happy and eager, so you do it. This is where the problems begin because it turns out that these sites are offensive, plagiarize content and don’t know the first thing about keyword optimization.
Now, all of these things won’t be true at the same time but it goes to prove a point. A poorly kept website or even a troublemaking one can lower the quality of your backlinks and thus your favor with the search engines. What you really want is backlinks that are of the same or preferably better quality than your site.
Quality Backlinks
How do you determine quality? If its a Blog, you could look at their following. Do they have a lot of readers? Are their articles rated on the first page of search engine results?
Make sure you Keep your links within your chosen niche. While there may be some gardening websites with a high search engine ranking, linking from here won’t do you any good if your website sells baby goods. Yes, the bots can look at that too – I told you they were clever!
So, what criteria do you need to consider when approaching the subject of backlinks?
• Choose similar or better quality websites to use for your backlinks
• Choose websites and blogs with similar topics of interest as yours
• Ask friends and family members with websites (of good rep, of course) to exchange links with you
Make sure you spread the word out about your website. You can use any resources you have available to you first and once you’ve used these up, you can start searching for other high-quality sites to bring you more traffic.