Monday, January 26, 2009

What are backlinks and why are they so important

A backlink, also known as an inbound link, is a link that directs back to your site from another site. They are one of the key ways to get your site noticed by the major search engines, especially Google. When someone thinks the content of your site is important enough to put on their site, the search engine spiders will index that content and place you on the search engine so you don't have to do it manually.

The higher the number of backlinks you have the higher the rank the search engine will give your site. But, keep in mind, it's not just the number of backlinks, it is also the quality of the backlink that is important. A search engine will consider a backlink good in quality it its content is related to the content of your site. So it's good to get backlinks from sites with a similar content base.

Here are some ways that you can build backlinks:

  1. Run contests and giveaways
  2. List your site in directories like DMOZ
  3. Post in forums. In some forums, when you post, it is acceptable to add a link to your site in your signature line.
  4. Post comments on blogs that are similar in content to yours. Post comments that are relevant and sincere, don't just comment for the sake of creating a backlink.
  5. Comment on Ezine articles
  6. Google has a great feature called Alerts. You can enter search terms related to your niche and google will alert you by email or feed when your search terms are found in the latest articles, latest blog posts, latest web pages, latest videos and the latest 'group' posts. For backlinking purposes you can choose to be alerted only when your search terms show up in new blog posts so you can visit that blog and leave a comment.
  7. Build Hubpages
  8. Build Squidoo Lenses
  9. Submit your RSS feed to twitter so every time you create a new post to your blog it will be automatically tweeted for you.
  10. Write about things people want to know. People are always looking for good information, tutorials and how-to's
**To find out if your blog or site has backlinks, enter the url of your site into the search bar of google with the 'link:' key in front of it and hit search. ex. link: http://bejeweledbycandi.blogspot.com/



12 comments:

Times And Chimes

Hi! I'm a little tech challenged! How do I add my RSS feed to Twitter? I am unsure what my RSS feed is and where to locate it...

*embarrassed*

KayzKreationz

Some great ideas. I'm off to check to see if my site has backlinks and a few other things you mentioned. Thanks.
http://KayzKreationz.blogspot.com

Beth

Very informative, thank you! And timely--I just did the RSS feed for my blog and shop to twitter.

Debra

Great post! Thanks for sharing.

Anonymous

Great information; still not quite sure I understand it. Do the links show up on our blog also? What happens when I click on your "add a link"...a box popped up asking if I wanted to publish it...where?

Baroness Bijoutery

You always have such great information to share....thank you. I've learn alot from you.....

Census

Thanks for the clear explanation and sound advice! I need to look at this for my blog.

Anonymous

Thanks for the information. I did not know that the squid lenses could actually help with page rank. I'll have to check into it. I use twitter when I put on a new post which helps bring different traffic. I was surprised to find out that twitter pages have page rank too :)

Ask Ms Recipe

Anonymous

This is a great post,thanks for this ideas,some I really have not know!!!

Missy

Thanks again Candi for great tips!

Jill

great information!

Kim

You have a great post here! Just for additional information. If you want your page to ranked on search engines like Google and Yahoo, you need to have more backlinks for your site. There are three ways on how to acquire backlinks - one way, two way and three way. Two way is the most commonly used. This is done by exchanging links among other webmasters. Always remember that there are two types of links - inbound links and the outbound links. Inbound links are links that are pointing towards your own site from other websites while outbound links are links that are going out from your site to other websites. Outbound links are usually what you put in your link pages or resource pages.