What are backlinks?

Plain and simple, backlinks are links that point back to your site. They are links you have exchanged with or received from other sites, as well as links placed strategically by you in forum posts, blog posts and comments, and the resource box of submitted articles. The submission of your site to website directories also provides backlinks that are highly favored by search engines.

Ideally these links, especially those placed in your forum signature and resource box of published articles (see my related article “Your Signature – An Internet Marketing Goldmine”), will contain keywords in the text of the link to create “anchor text.” Placing keywords in the text of the link anchors your keyword(s) to your url rather than anchoring “Click here” or your website name to your url. Not only do you have a backlink to your site, you have created a link of higher quality that includes the keywords you are targeting in your overall marketing campaign.

Why do I need backlinks?

The number of quality backlinks linking to a site is one of the main criteria used by Google and other search engines to rank and place websites. This statement, written by David Austin in a Feature Column of the Monthly Essays on Mathematical Topics, sums it up: “The fundamental idea put forth by PageRank’s creators, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, is this: the importance of a page is judged by the number of pages linking to it as well as their importance.”

With this all-powerful statement from the creators of Google, the importance should be clear: you need backlinks to attract the robots that determine the importance of your website. The value of your page, your website, in the eyes of Google’s robot lies in the number and quality of the links that it finds from other sites to yours. As the number of other popular, high-ranking sites find your site worth linking to grows, your popularity goes up along with your position in the search results.

In other words, quality backlinks are needed to entice search engines to stand up and take notice.

Backlinks are also helpful in leading visitors to your site. In this regard, backlinks are much like bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel to find their way back home. When your site is new, the robot will not place your site at the top of the results list immediately no matter how much time and effort went into the design and SEO of your site. Links from other sites that searchers are likely to find could lead them to your site if they look through the links page to find related products that might be available on your site.

In addition, links placed in posts to forums and blogs and the resource box of published articles have the potential of being seen and followed by thousands of visitors every day. If the forums, blogs, and article directories have high page ranks, you have more than just a link for visitors to follow, you have a quality link that will serve to increase your page rank as well as your traffic.

What are quality backlinks?

Quality backlinks are links from websites that have a higher page rank than your site, links from websites that have content or purpose related to your site (also known as relevance), links that include anchored text, and links that are built naturally over time, not a sudden increase in links just for the sake of having a high number of links.

Google has made it very clear that the importance of a site in the eyes of Googlebot is greatly influenced by the number and importance of the pages linking to it. In order to increase your PageRank, your website’s importance in the eyes of search engines, seek out links from higher-ranking sites that have related content, include anchored text in your signature for forum and blog posts as well as your resource box in articles, and let links build naturally over time. These practices will be a valuable part of your overall marketing strategy.

Claudia Pate is the owner of The Anniversary Shop, traditional and modern anniversary gifts, and Common Sense Ebiz, guide to online business opportunities. Learn more about article writing to increase your PageRank with quality backlinks.

BRIEF INTRO. PageRank is google’s valuation of your website. Your pagerank comes pegged on a scale from 0 to 10.

Uh- okay… so what?

Let’s make it so easy that even your cat would mewl.

Think of Pagerank like real estate pricing. The higher your site ranks on that scale, the more valuable it is in Google’s eyes. You, the webmaster, enjoy explosive benefits the higher your pagerank: your site gets indexed more often, you appear in the top ten placements and people will kill each other to advertise their site on yours. To the tune of thousands of greenbacks a month.

Bottomline: websites of considerable persuasion and influence boast high pagerank.

If your site has less than a Pagerank 4, you’re s nobody. Pagerank 5 means you’re a rising hotshot. Folks would pay $30 a month to place a link on your site. Pagerank 6 means you’re almost a god. Not only would you rank in the top ten search engine rankings for chosen keywords, you’d rake in lotsa moolah from ad revenue.

Are you mewling like a cat yet?

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s hunker down to getting you a Pagerank 7 in 200 days.

CREATING A SITE OF MASSIVE INFLUENCE

1) Raid a few webhosts that allows you to buy domains on cheap. I’d recommend godaddy.com or doteasy.com Purchase at least 40 domains across different C Class IPs. The .info , .mobi and .biz variety go for a dime a dozen. Register them and build up a single page on each one. Fill the pages with quality content. No scraped info or you’ll get deindexed. Your bucks would go down the drain faster than cash at a casino. Hire a ghostwriter if you must.

2) Create backlinks to each of these sites from domains that wield extremely high pagerank. It’s easy to accomplish with Netscape.com and NewsVine.com. Now before you get all excited, understand that this tactic will work if you judiciously pick profitable tags. The tag ‘business’ ranks a whopper of a pagerank 7 at netscape. (http://www.netscape.com/tag/business). Listing your 40 domains under this directory gets a pagerank 7 backlink!

3) Amp the power. List your domains at DMOZ and Relmaxtop.com . You’ll garner at least a Pagerank 4 backlink to each site.

4) Post meaningful comments on one or two blogs listed here: courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/ These blogs have the NoFollow attribute disabled, allowing you to suck in more PR to each of your domains.

5) Post meaningful comments on mattcuts.com, pearsonified.com and scobleizer.com. Google ranks these sites at pagerank 8+. If your sensible comment is approved, you get more rank boosting.

6) Use this string in google search box to find high credibility .edu blogs where you can get quick backlinks from: [[site:.edu inurl:blog "post a comment" -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in" "Your-Key-Word"]] If your link appears on a .edu domain, Google accords your mucho respect. In spades. Ensure you write MEANINGFUL comments on these .edu sites, or I’ll disown you and send the Italian Mafia to kick your arse and sink you in the Ganges.

7) Wait for the next PageRank update. Twiddle your thumbs and get fat on some MacDonalds quarterpounders to pass the time.

Et Voila! After the next update, the Google Toolbar will indicate that ALL your 40 sites have achieved a shiny PageRank 3 or 4. Man, wasn’t that easy?? (FYI, google updates pagerank every three months or so)

9) Now that your sites wield considerable persuasive influence, I want you to create three new domains and have all original 40 sites link to these.

10) Wait for the next pagerank update and BAM! The three new domains now flex a Pagerank 5!. Hallelujah!! But wait. You don’t want a lousy 5. You want at least a seven. So what you do is to create two new domains and have the three pagerank 5s link to that.

11) Wait again. (do you get the pattern here?) Suck on some fries. Get more girlfriends. Take up racing. Then at the next pagerank update, the Google Tool Bar will bring you news that will wet your pants: GOODGRACIOUSGLORIOUSGOD! The two new domains are now Pagerank 6!! Wait. We’re not done yet. I want you to create a new domain. And guess what? I want you to link the two pagerank 6 sites to your new domain.

12) Wait again. Nuninuninu. By now you should have 10 girlfriends and boast a nice paunch from all those quarterpounders. But so what? After the next pagerank update, your new domain should now be a gloriously persuasive Pagerank 7. Ahh. Now you can kick back and relax. Because with this single website, any other website you link to will be transformed into an instant Pagerank 6. Everyone knows that sites these stellar command unbelievable advertising power. So what you do from here… well, it’s up to your imagination.

Disclaimer. Well actually its an apology. I promised you a Pagerank 7 in 200 days? Actually, make it more like 365 days because that’s how long it would take google to go through all those updates. But heck, what’s an extra 165 days between friends?

Fly high and rule the web world with persuasion and influence!

Joseph Plazo is recognized persuasion expert … but can’t persuade his business partners and clients to leave him alone.You simply can’t be persuaded to miss out on his massive library of free Persuasion downloads.

Google, says yes, links to your site are important! They
say to help you get a bigger search engine ranking, make
sure other sites link to yours.

By having other sites linking to yours, it helps Google’s
crawlers find your site and as well gives your site a greater
visibility in their search results.

Google uses their PageRank with sophisticated text-matching
techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant
to each search.

Google interprets links to your site as a “vote” for your site
from the other sites. Google looks at more than the sheer
volume of votes, or links a page receives, it also analyzes
the page that casts the vote. “Votes” from sites that Google
considers “important” will weigh more heavily in determining
your search engine ranking.

Therefore, do NOT go out and try to get as many links as
possible. Google calls these “unnatural links” that are placed
there specifically to make your site look more popular to
the search engines. These types of links are link farms, or
linking schemes and doorway pages.

Google says in their Webmaster Guidelines:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your
site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web
spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own
ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

Link Farms:
I am seeing more and more webmasters asking for “three
way links”. For example, if you place their link on your site,
they will place your link on a different site other than their
main site. They try to justify it as a better solution than
reciprocating links from your site to theirs by saying
it’s a one way link to your site from the “link farm”.

Therefore, the “three way linkers” do not have any links
on their main site. They are getting higher quality sites to
link to them, making it appear that their site is more popular.

You get the short end of the stick! Your site’s link is now on
a site that is nothing more than a “link farm”.

Link farms are sites that have nothing but a huge directory of
links. The search engines do NOT see these as “important”.
So therefore, you have just hurt your site by agreeing to a
three way link exchange.

There are many reciprocal link management services and
link farm products. You will recognize them by the
template-based emails offering to exchange links. All of
them will want to place your link in nothing but a directory
of links (a link farm), where it does not do your site
any good at all and will actually harm your search engine
ranking.

Awhile back when I realized what was going on, I began
declining all “three way link” exchange offers. However, I
did keep those in my links directory, which had been
submitted before that. Now I see that was also a mistake.
My PageRank dropped a point. The PageRanks of my
links directory pages that had once been between 1 to
3, dropped to 0.

Therefore I have cleaned up my Links Directory and
deleted all sites that were “three way links”. You may want
to do the same if you want to improve your search engine
ranking.

How To Properly Do Reciprocal Link Exchanges:

DO go to websites that are relevant to your site’s theme.
Check to see if they have a “Links” page or it may be
listed as “Link Exchange Program”. These are usually
listed on websites in the lower left hand or right hand
columns or at the bottom of the site.

Follow their instructions for submitting your link, after all
you are the one asking them, not the other way around. If
they ask you to send an email, do it. If they ask you to fill out
a form to submit your request for a link exchange, do so.

Do NOT send them an email without even visiting their
site. I get so many emails that say, “I just visited your
wonderful site…. blah, blah, blah, it would be to both
our advantage to exchange links…”

I know they did not visit my site, if they did they would
have seen the link to my Link Exchange Program which
clearly states that I do not do exchanges by email, and
they must click on the link and fill out the request form.

I hope this helps you in understanding the significance
of links exchanges and how to avoid the pitfalls when
building your link exchange program.

Everyday Business Online
Online Marketing Advertising and Promotion Resources, EBONews Ezine,
Home Business Tips, Ideas and More.

Technorati Tags: reciprocal linking, link exchange, three way, link farm, link schemes

The fact remains that the more you can vary the techniques used on your site, the better. This means you should have a goal of doing many different things on your site by way of linking. For these examples, the practices remain the same no matter what your site’s about, but for example’s sake, we’ll assume you have a site that sells baking and cooking utensils.

• Link subpages to subpages when doing a reciprocal whenever possible. Ask the person if they wouldn’t mind liking to your page on egg beaters rather than to the main page of your site, and tell them that you’ll link to their recipe for western omelettes from your egg beaters page. Or, better yet: Ask them if they’ll link to your page on egg beaters from their western omelettes page, and tell them that you’ll link to their recipe on cheesecake from your page about springform pans.
• Do have a resources page, if only for the simple fact that some people will refuse to do the above, however you really want their link. You will also find that if you don’t have a resources page, you’ll eventually have so many links on your individual pages that they encompass half the content. THIS IS BAD. You should strive for no more than 5 outgoing links on any given subpage, so when you run out of room you’ll need a place to put the other links.
• Make sure that every link you get is a relevant one. (This shouldn’t even have to be stated, but unfortunately, there are still some people who believe that any link is a good one.) If you sell baking supplies, don’t get a link going with an erectile dysfunciton pill site. Plain and simple.
• You can also be skillful in placing links out within your content. Write an article about using your baking supplies, and link out to dessert recipe sites, asking them for a link back to you. Again, don’t overdo it… no more than 1 link for every other paragraph or so.
• And of course, don’t forget the free directories. These can be invaluable when it comes to link popularity, but even for the ones that don’t affect it, it can help boost traffic. You never know what kind of search engine/directory John Doe uses… just be cautious of “directories” that use cgi redirects – they do NOTHING for you. And don’t waste time on this one… a dozen or so new ones a few times a year is fine.

So there you have it – Anubis Marketing’s Preferred Linking Strategy – in a nutshell.

Lara Kulpa – Anubis Marketing
Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Programs
Link Strategy, Web Design, Blog Development
http://www.anubismarketing.com/

Technorati Tags: link pages, reciprocal links, link exchange, link program

Here are a couple of typical responses:

“I still think getting links is a good idea. There are some topics on the web that that’s all visitors do is follow links.”"Link exchanges will end up killing a site, many people who have them find themselves under a penalty now.”

Very seldom will anyone from either side of the link exchange issue offer definite proof of their argument. Each post is colored with slight variations on the degree to which it is bad or good. Each poster tries desperately to establish some credibility for themselves while arguing that their actions and decisions are the RIGHT way and this leads quickly to another heated, circular debate with no clear winners. This leaves the person asking the original question more confused than they were when they asked it in the first place.

Frankly, no one has any idea what Google, or any other search engine, will like or not like. What worked before may not work now, and no one can give a definitive answer as to why. As the old Zen master once said, “It is what it is.”

Now logic dictates that Google does not want to penalize sites engaging in link exchanges. What Google wants is to please the people that rely on them to provide a quality resource.

How does exchanging links or the avoidance of the practice, define a quality resource? It doesn’t. People define a quality resource, and therein lies the answer to what approach one should take regarding exchanging links.

As a person you are completely competent to know when exchanging a link increases or decreases the quality of your web site. If anything you do, including linking to a web site that links to you, increases the quality, that is good. If the exchanging of links decreases the quality, that is bad.

Remember this: You have every right to do whatever you think is best for your web site.

You can’t control Google, but you can control your site. If you exchange links or do not exchange links because you think it will make Google do something, your chances of losing at some point go way up. If you exchange links or don’t exchange links because it makes your site better, then you win. And doesn’t it make sense that Google wants winners?

Jake Lowrey has more than 30 years experience in the communications field as a writer, editor and public relations professional. He has been writing content and articles and optimizing web pages online since 2003, most recently for Team Link Network.

Technorati Tags: link, exchanges, webmaster, search engine, google, quality links

1. Search engines are known not to favor ‘plain reciprocal linking’ between sites because they do not enhance the value of the links in their eyes. Does this mean SEs penalize sites that resort to directory-style reciprocal linking? May be not, but there is no value addition either.
2. There has been too much abuse of the concept of reciprocal linking, and it is still not uncommon to find reciprocal links among completely disparate sites. Clearly, it is like waving red flags to search engines.
3. As a result of (1) and (2), most webmasters nowadays do not agree for plain reciprocal linking any longer.

However, there have been instances where website owners take recourse to ‘turnkey’ reciprocal linking. What happens is that site A links to B, B to C, C to D, and lastly D to A. Since no 2 sites link directly with each other, there’s a belief that this works.

Nothing can be farther from truth. It is possible for search engines to easily ferret out such covert understanding, and in fact are not favored either.

With that as backdrop, are there no way for reciprocal linking that can be made to work in your favor? The answer is ‘yes’, and the trick too is rather simple, but to make it work needs some planning and hard work. Let’s look at the following example. Say it’s an article about content writing, and the paragraph below is a part of that.

Fact is, if you need to offer a product or service, you have to write a powerful ad that can convince your customers. Writing an effective sales copy is not anyone’s cup of tea. Which means unless you hire an expert who has experience in relevant [link starts]content writing[link ends], you stand less and less chance to succeed in your objective.

Here the phrase ‘content writing’ is used as an anchor text to provide link pointing to a site of your choice. Now if this site too links back to your site through an anchor text of your choice in an article like above, it will be a classic case of reciprocal linking without rubbing SEs the wrong way. Since there is some amount of value addition at either end, the SEs are not likely to object.

However, though the trick appears simple enough, it is equally, if not more, hard to put it in practice. After all, how many reciprocal links can you generate this way? It’s not only that you need to write contents relevant to your site that can refer to your potential link-partners’ sites, they also need to do same. Not many would care for that trouble.

But, are not there exceptions? Yes, John Chow for one. He offers to link to your blog if you review his blog (John Chow Dot Com). Yet, all said and done, anchor-text reciprocal linking is a tough call indeed.

Okay, reciprocal linking is now considered as passe, but the need still lingers on. If you’re still with me, let’s venture into how you can find your potential link partners. Here are some tools and options.

Partha Bhattacharya, author of this article, reciprocal linking, owns and runs Words2Content blog that focuses on writing, blogging and optimizing web contents. When time permits, he also writes at Kolkata Musing, a blog on the city of Kolkata in India where he lives.

Technorati Tags: reciprocal linking, link exchange, link popularity, link building, linking

Outbound links are also important, and while some people worry about adding external links to their websites, if done properly, outbound links can offer a boost on the search engine results page. When placing outbound links, only place links that will send visitors to reputable, authoritative sites. Be choosy when placing outbound links, and be positive that none of the links you place are broken.

Inbound, as well as outbound links should be a part of your linking campaign. It doesn’t make sense to have one without the other. Both of these are somewhat of a life- line that can either make or break your site on the SERP. It would be worthwhile to try and get as many inbound links as you can, not only on a variety of websites, but also on numerous different networks.

The SERP, or search engine results page, is a complete listing of the web pages returned by search engines in response to a keyword query. The results on the SERP generally include such details as a list of web pages with their titles, a link to that particular webpage, and also a brief description showing where the keywords have matched content within the webpage. The search engines construct the SERP once and it is then saved for future inquiries. Search engines do crawl the web periodically to account for new pages, and then the SERP is rebuilt.

Recently, the SERP has begun to offer users of the search engines new and improved features that include suggestions for alternate keywords, images, definitions, local matches and even files on the users very own computer.

Without the aid of inbound and outbound links, your website will not have favorable results on the search engine results page. It is a known fact that only 7% of all websites are even visible to the search engines. This means that 93% of the websites in existence are not optimized correctly, and are losing out on the SERP. Utilize those inbound and outbound links, and be a part of the 7%.

Links exchange

Technorati Tags: inbound links, outbound links, SEO, SERP, exchange links