Backlinks, or inbound links are essential for effective SEO. For a web site to be listed near the top of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing without it costing a fortune in PPC advertising it needs to have a large quantity of inbound links.
What are backlinks?
So what are they? Simply put, backlinks are links from one website to another. Better established, high Page Rank(PR) websites containing higher quality content can exert a lot more more influence on the positioning of search engines’ placement of the websites they link to. Authority sites in particular, such as education or government sites that have no commercial axe to grind carry a lot of weight — and if a website has a lot of high quality backlinks, it has a much better chance of achieving a high position. There is quite a marked difference between the traffic generated by a website appearing at position #1and one appearing on page 2. Even positions “below the fold” — in other words in the bottom half of the search engine results page — see only a fraction of the traffic of sites appearing above the fold.
How to get links to your website
So what is the process of getting quality backlinks to your website? Well, it can be done in many ways. One school of thought favours submitting articles to directory sites, others advocate posting on forums or commenting on blogs. Many Webmasters submit their websites to Internet directories, such as DMOZ, an open directory that is one of the most respected online and referred to by many search engines. The difference with the DMOZ is that the entries have all been vetted by human editors, not automated, although it can take a long time for websites to be included.
And, of course, you can always ask the Webmaster of the site you want a link from — a polite email explaining why you think his or her visitors would benefit from your content is often successful, but you will generally have to include a reciprocal link to their website before this request is granted!
A relatively new method of generating backlinks is to utilize Social Bookmarking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. These are websites that are free to join and have a popular community feel to them. Their rise has been meteoric over the last few years, and their members can save their favorite websites identified by ‘tags’ – a brief description in a word or two of the site’s contents. These tags can then be saved and listed publicly, making them visible to everybody.
Web 2.0
Since the arrival of Web 2.0, acquiring backlinks is now easier than ever. Popular CMS systems such as Joomla, CMSMS, and the ubiquitous WordPress have the capacity to be interactive so that visitors can register and add their own profile on the site. WordPress revolutionized interactivity by allowing users to add comments on the articles, or posts, featured on the blog or website. The site or blog owner often responds to comments left, thereby beginning a two way dialogue similar to a conversation.
Comments left on blogs, author bios in articles and forum postings can all include a signature line, and this signature can contain a link back to the owner’s website. Consequently, each and every post, comment and article becomes a link back to the site, making it easy to get additional backlinks. Not only that, but many site owners learn new techniques, meet other people with similar interests, and have a great deal of fun doing a job that used to be considered a chore – link building.
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