After getting your site up and in front of the masses you want to begin to promote it. If others don’t know about it, it’s not very likely that they will visit.
Of course you can sit there and hope that by blind luck you will move to the top of the search engines. Or maybe it isn’t luck and you have done some really good search engine optimization on your site. That’s great, but you are still going to want to promote.
Today, I want to talk to you about backlinks and exactly how they effect the ranking of your site.
First the basics.
What is a Backlink?
Almost every website on the internet has some sort of link. When clicked on these links take you to different areas on the page, different pages or different sites. These links are pathways between different pages and sites.
The type of link I will be discussing today is the backlink, sometimes referred to as back link, incoming link, inward link or inbound link.
No matter what term is used to describe it, the function remains the same. A backlink is when another page or website links to one of the pages on you site.
Why are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are important for several reasons.
- They help users like you and me find interesting and useful information on the Internet. Without them searching for information would be a difficult task.
- They help with the ranking of your page. I say page, because search engines rank individual pages not sites. It is possible for you to have a high ranking on one page of your site and a low ranking on another.
Getting Backlinks
How are Rankings Determined?
When determining rankings, search engines look at several different properties of inbound links and they all play in an important role in determining the ranking of your page.
The number of links pointing back to your page is the first factor. This is pretty self explanatory.
The age of the link is the second factor. How long has that backlink been pointing back to your page? The longer the better.
The third factor is the link quality. What sites are linking back to you? Are they low ranking spam sites or high ranking quality web pages? I think you can see that a link back from a site such as CNN would have more weight than a two day old blog.
Think of your page as a contestant on American Idol. Now think of other websites as the voters and backlinks as a vote. To cast a vote, the website must backlink to the your contestant page. The more backlinks cast the more popular your page becomes. The backlink votes let Ryan Searchengine know that your page is interesting and deserves to move to the top of the contestant list.
Now as I said before it’s not just the number of links, but the quality and the age of the link as well. Nobody really knows how much weight each piece is given by the search engines, but concentrate on building quality links and you’ll be ok.
Here’s a tip I’d like to give you. To get high quality backlinks pointing to your site, create high quality content.
I guarantee that if you build quality content that others are interested in, the links will begin to build themselves.
If you have subscribed to my site (upper right hand corner), I will soon be emailing you some techniques I use to find and build backlinks back to my site. If you would like to be notified when these are released be sure to submit your name and email.
