Building the Best Backlinks

Posted on July 2nd, 2012. Written by Suhail.

Links are an extremely important element in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The World Wide Web, at its core, is millions of sites interconnected through hyperlinks. Links are also what a search engine’s web crawler uses to traverse from site to site. Search engines employ different algorithms in order to rank a website in their search results. The number and quality of links to your site are significant factors used for the calculation of page rank. Every link leading a visitor to your site helps you elevate your page rank, which ultimately leads to better visibility for your sites in search results.

All about Links

Links are often classified as either internal links or backlinks. The internal links, as their name indicates, are links within the pages of a site. Backlinks, on the contrary, are the links through which other sites drive traffic your way. Of course, internal linking is quite significant, as it allows the crawler to navigate through your site and enables a good user experience. But, internal links don’t really help you improve your page rank. The reason why backlinks matter a lot in the calculation of the page rank is that good backlinks are hard to build because when a site promotes yours, it means they like your site and its content. Therefore, backlinks are considered reliable by the engine. Quality backlinks are the best thing for your SEO and, consequently, for your site.

How to Get Quality Backlinks?

The problem isn’t getting links – it’s getting quality links, a slightly more challenging task. The “natural” way to gain links is to make sure people like your site so that they’ll want to drive visitors from their sites to yours. It’s like when you recommend friends the new coffee shop you went to. You wouldn’t recommend it to them, if you didn’t like it. In order to make people like your site enough to want to promote it, you need to focus on your content. Since quality content in itself is an element of SEO, you should be particularly focused on it. There are plenty of other, “unnatural” ways of getting backlinks too, discussed below.

Getting Listed in Directories – getting listed in directories, like DMOZ and Yahoo, is a good way to get your site detected by the search engines. The good news is that this won’t cost you a dime and it will surely get you some good quality backlinks, but on the down side, it might take some time to get listed under your desired category.

Blogs, Forums and Article Directories – posting in forums can also get you some good backlinks. But, you’ll have to make sure that the forum is a reliable, spam-free one. It is actually convenient too because you can select the anchor text yourself and you have the freedom of choosing a good quality forum or blog. It’s simple and effective, if you choose the blog or forum wisely. Article directories are also a great way to promote your site and create quality backlinks. But, where forum posts could be short and to-the-point, articles would take more effort on your part. If you do put in the work, the result won’t be disappointing.

RSS Feeds – you can offer free RSS feeds to relevant sites. As your feeds appear on a site, your site gets a backlink, which will bring visitors to your site.

There are various other ways to get backlinks, but you should remember if a site with a better rank advertizes your site, then it will raise your own rank. Domains like“.edu” and “.gov” increase the quality of backlinks. You must also create profiles for your site on popular social networking sites because they are a source of free and reliable publicity.

What you shouldn’t do

There are many manipulative ways of getting to improve your page rank, but the search engines don’t approve of them. One of these ways is the reciprocal link exchange, wherein sites create links for each other, so that they get mutual traffic. Search engines can easily detect them and then these sites are devalued. Link farming is another popular technique which is considered manipulative by the engines. It involves creating fake, automatic pages just to create links. There are various others, but search engines constantly enhance their ranking algorithms to combat them.

Suhail

Professional content writer having experience in writing all types of contents like articles, blogs, ebooks, squidoo lenses, hubpages, reviews, web content, news, press releases, link wheel creation and much more.Check out my Gigs here: http://www.seoclerks.com/user/Suhail