What are Quality Backlinks?Best Linking Practice. Finding Backlinks For Your Website?

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are links on other websites pointing at your website. Without adequate links pointing at your website it will likely never achieve higher keyword ranking.

Good Backlinks Improve Website Ranking

Website ranking involves more than just putting your website online. The old addage, "Build it and they will come" is no longer true. In order to find good backlinks you need to not only have quality content on your website but also focus on getting good backlinks from relevant websites.

Search engines rank websites according to how many quality backlinks they find pointing at your website. Quality is determined by how relevant the other site is to your site and where the link is placed on their page (within the content is best) and how many other links are on the page (less is better). A large number of links pointing at your site does not guarantee success. You need quality backlinks in order to rise to the first page of results and the more you can find the better. The best way to encourage people to link to your content is to provide information that is useful to your visitors, like "how to find backlinks".

Also see Search Engine Optimization TipsS for more linking ideas.

What are Quality Backlinks?

• Your link on a site with high PR (page rank)
• Your link on a page with few other links
• Your link within the content of the page (not the footer or sidebars)
• A link from a relevant site

Google recently changed it's algorighym so that if there is an excess of traded links, purchased links, or if you get involved in triangular linking schemes, or buy hundreds or thousands of links, then it will draw a red flag for Google and then Google may apply a filter to your site to prevent it from ranking well.

An occasional, relevant link trade is ok and having to buy a link in Yahoo directory or another directory that is human reviewed where you have to pay for the review (and not the submission) is OK, but anything in exess can cause you problems with your ranking in Google because they can tell when link gathering is not normal as it keeps a record of your link profile which affects your trust ranking.

Google is having to do this due to too many finding some new trick that helps their keyword rank (like hidden text) and then everyone else follows suit and then Google has to clamp down on that practice — until next time someone comes up with a "bright idea" to boost their ranking.

So anything you do to try and manipulate your rank in Google can draw a red flag and your site could be banned, penalized or have your keyword rank filtered out, i.e., you won't be able to rank for anything no matter what you do.

Best Linking Practice

The best, and easiest, method to gather links is to provide something on your website that people will want to link to, i.e., if you build bridges offer free bridge building plans, if you sell dessert products offer free recipies, if you provide a service write up a FAQ about your service, etc. On LWD, I provide a lot of HTML tips, Css Tips,graphics tutorials and articles on keyword ranking and other topics. 

Finding Backlinks For Your Website

Google uses age of the site, backlinks, social networking as well as PR to rank sites (along with many other factors) so, unless you want to PayPerClick for the life of the site, you need to gather a lot of links and write a lot of content to get ranking as high as possible as it's doubtful that your competitors will be sitting still and doing nothing.

• Find friends, businesses associates, individuals, or organizations who are willing to link to your website as soon as it's online, then you won't need to submit to search engines because the search engines can find your link on a site they have indexed already. Some of them may require a link trade but try to get mostly one-way links.
  
• Relevant Links: Look for websites focused on what your site offers but have a different focus, i.e., submit to a gardening site if you sell garden tools.
  
• Competitors Links: Check to see where your competitors are getting their links and try and submit your website there also.
  
• Find Directories in Your Own Niche Submit to directories in your own niche, i.e., if you sell or offer information about vitamins then look for directories focused on health products. However Google has demoted directory links so don't put a lot of focus on these.
  
• Free Submission Directories If you aim for free submissions from directories you may need to request about 10 times as many backlinks as you actually need as very few free links are accepted by directories claiming to accept free submissions. They do this so they won't be penalized for only offering paid links. When submitting, change your anchor text (title of your site) frequently so there is a wide variety of keywords to rank for, however you will probably have to pay for anything other than your official site name.
  
  
  
• Write Articles Write quality articles related to the focus of your website and submit to other sites that accept guest writers. Provide a link within the article to your site related to the focus in the article -- not necessarily your home page. Do NOT post the same article on your own website or you may be penalized for duplicate content.
  
• Submit Press Releases Only submit press releases when you have a valid reason for one--any new development on your site or an original focus with your products that the customers on the press release will be interested in.
  
• Blogging Post messages in blogs related to the topic of your site with a link to your website within the post where appropriate. Try to get links that are NOT "no followed" but even those will help your rank a little bit due to your site being mentioned (it's called a citation).
  
• Participate in Forums Find forums related to your website's focus and post often so you will get noticed and build up trust so people will click on the link in your profile or signature and possibly link to your site from their own site or in other forums showing where they found valuable information. Most forums now put a rel="nofollow" on all outgoing links so this may not benefit you with ranking but may bring some traffic.
  

How Many Backlinks is Enough?

That depends on your major keywords. Are they popular? If so, you will have a struggle to beat your competition and may have to resort to PayPerClick along with backlinks.

If very few websites advertise what you offer then you may not need very many backlinks to rank high in the search engines but your traffic may still be minimal because of your site being so specialized. In that case diversify and add more information.

Your backlinks need to be replenished each year because some sites along with their backlinks go offline. Your competitors are probably eagerly seeking more backlinks to outrank you so unless you actively seek more backlinks each year your rank may drop.

Pay Per Click is only temporary

Getting good quality backlinks is a lengthy process and can take several months--unless you want to utilize PayPerClick (Google's AdWords) and then it can achieve almost immediate results but those results will end as soon as you quit paying so it's a good idea to gather links at the same time.