By: Jonathan Haryanto

Backlinks have become one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization. Backlinks, also known as “Inbound Links,” refer to the links that are placed on other websites and that are directed towards your website. They are what tells the search engines that you have a site of interest to others who have linked to it, thus raise your ranking on the search engines.

Backlinks are important to climb the page ranking in the search engines. What other websites say about you is critical for search engine credibility. If you can control what the links say and where they link to in your site then you can influence the search engine results. Therefore, your marketing campaign for your sites has to include the effort of obtaining link popularity.

While building backlinks, you need to aim for quality instead of quantity. Search engines give more credit to a link from a site related to yours than a link from a site that is not related to yours. A site with few quality backlinks will have a higher position for its targeted keywords compared to a website with many unrelated links. Especially if you combine that with relevant content, links to important pages, meta tags, descriptions, title, h1 tags, and sitemaps. However, most search engines do not consider hyperlinks as backlinks.

There are a number of ways to build backlinks for your site. Backlinks can be bought or obtained for free. There are a number of directories available on Internet, and you can find free or paid directories for submitting your site. Your site will be listed in these directories after the editor has approved it. You need to make sure that the directory is an established one since search engines give more credit to links coming from quality sites. In bidding directories, you can place a bid and if your bid is among the highest bids then your site is displayed on the homepage. If someone outbids you then your listing is removed from the homepage.

In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. But here you must note that one way link holds more strength than a two way link. Moreover, in the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the outbound links still got counted, the irrelevant inbound link was ignored.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own several related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. You will probably have heard of ‘3 way links’. There are some issues with that as well. Other than price, the most ‘popular’ system is a little clunky to use and the links are not so close to topic.

Article directory, a directory that maintains a large collection of articles, is one of the best ways to build links. It allows you to publish your articles along with your links in the resource box. You provide them for free with something they need content and in return they also provide you for free with something you need quality backlinks. Of course, you should make sure that the article you submit is of good quality and informative in order to get approved and published. They usually have a number of categories and you will have to find a category suitable for your website.

Posting in discussion forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. There are a number of forums and blogs that allows you to place your links in your profile and in your signature. You need to look for a forum or blog that is related to your niche and then make some quality posts or comments and add your links in the signature. Once your posts are indexed, search engines will give some credit to your website. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. In some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones.

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The importance of generating backlinks to increase Page rank can not be emphasized any more, it is absolutely mandatory. Once you start your backlink building campaign, you will find that it can be a difficult task if you don’t know which direction to take.

The traditional way to acquire backlinks is to search the internet for websites with a high PR that share the same or similar interest with your own and ask them for a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link is an link exchange between two website owners where each party agree to place each others links on their websites. The problem that occurs when searching for reciprocal links is, if you are just starting out, then your page rank will probably be zero. Most sites that are already established do not gain any incentive to exchange links with you.

The other alternatives to finding established sites to link is to get a little creative in order to build some backlinks. We all know that Web 2.0 social networking sites have bombarded the internet, but what most people do not realize is that they are a great source of high Pr backlinks. You can set up an account with several networks, submit a blog with a link to your website and voila!; you have created a quality backlink to your website.

Another source for acquiring backlinks that usually goes unnoticed are RSS feeds. You can use RSS feed for a variety of reasons. One reason is to receive great exposure for your website or blog. Once you submit your website to an RSS Feed Directory your feed can be subscribe to by numerous readers, thus creating great exposure for your website. RSS feeds are also a great backlinks tool, you can not only generate backlinks every time your RSS feed is subscribe to, but you will also get free backlinks from each RSS feed directory you use to submit your website.

For best results submit to about 15 directories at a time to spread the amount of traffic you will receive. Spreading your traffic will also help with you Google ranking. The search engines rank websites with consistent traffic higher. You also do not want to generate too many backlinks too fast, as to not raise any eyebrows with Google.

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I find it interesting that the World Wide Web has not changed that much even though Internet marketing has. The Web itself is composed of links all pointing to each other.

If you grasp this concept you can quickly understand why the more backlinks you have pointing to your website from a multitude of different sources the more potential traffic it you can bring to you.

Not only that but the traffic will continue to be there over a long period of time as long as the backlink remain. This means you must spend the majority of your time creating quality back links and all of your marketing efforts.

In the early days of Internet marketing reciprocal linking was very popular. Trading links with other sites was a way to create backlinks to your site.

This strategy is not as popular today because link directories are pretty much discarded by the major search engines. Not only that but you want to spend as much of your time creating one way backlinks to your site and not away from your site.

So how do you go about creating one way backlinks? Here are 3 easy ways that are working very well today and should be incorporated into your linking strategy.

1. Write and submit articles to the top article directories. In each article you can include a link pointing back to your website and your resource box.

For additional keyword relevance try hyperlinking your primary keyword phrase to your site as well. As you begin to develop backlinks to your homepage begin deep linking to sub pages within your site from your article resource boxes too.

2. Write blog articles and submit them to the top social directories. Search engines love fresh content and your blog articles will be spidered quickly if you submit them to the top social directories. We are talking about sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Propeller, Technorati, and more.

Each article submission creates a backlink to your blog or specific blog article. If you do not have a blog you are missing out on easy traffic and long term quality backlinks.

3. Utilize social networking to create links pointing back to any web page you have. For example when you create a new web page announce it as an update on your Twitter account.

When you Tweet your followers this way you are creating back links to any webpage or blog post you make. Again the search engines will find these, as well as your readers, giving you more potential traffic.

Other popular social networks to join and create a profile with your website address in include Facebook, My Space, eEntrepreneur, and many others.

I feel that the most important thing you can do to create a long-term Internet presence is concentrate on backlinks regardless of how the Internet changes in the future. These three ways right now are excellent to create backlinks to your website and blog!

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Well, this seems like a tough question. While you can put your link into link directories and put a return-link to them, those aren’t highly valued by search engines. It’s a backlink, but not one of the coveted ones.

You could put your link blog comments, but unless it’s relevant and has real meaning/input, there’s nothing to gain. Almost a negative gain really.

So what you really want is a quality site to give you a backlink. When it’s a related-topic website, it’s even better, as those readers have a predisposition to want to read what you have to say.

So, what is the #1 way to get quality and targeted backlinks?

#1 Write quality articles.

It’s that easy on the first way. You submit the articles to article directories, and in turn readers may find it via search engines, ezine publishers and website owners can use that great free content, a benefit to them and you, being that you get a backlink in the resource section to your own website. This gives you laser-targeted visitors. It is time-proven, and still works great today.

Are there any other easy ways to get backlinks?

#2 QUALITY Link exchanges

This one is extremely handy for the busy webmaster (which is pretty much all). There are many link exchanges out there to choose from. Be sure to chose a quality one and not one of the spam versions. If they promise to give you thousands of links overnight, steer clear. The guys at Google can see this blindfolded which is no good for your website. Be sure every exchange is expressly agreed to and you’re in good shape, so it is in reality just an exchange aid and perfectly fine by search engines.

#3 Forum signatures

This is a great one. If you’re already active in forums, just add a link to your site in your signature. This puts your link out there, but not in anybody’s face. The search engines also see fresh incoming backlinks to your website, a definite perk.

#4 Provide quality content

This is a great and on-going one. Just provide good content that other webmasters feel would be a great read for their readers, and you’ll gain natural backlinks. This is exactly what search engines like Google would ideally like to see, as it is backlinks just for user benefit with no intentional motives on the search engine front.

As you can see, there are many ways to get quality coveted backlinks, and the above are just a few examples. Don’t try to do it all overnight. Instead, keep it in your mind and plug away at it consistently, and provide a quality website, and success is sure to follow.

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In short, a Backlink indicates a link from another site to your website. These are also known as inbound links and their number indicates the popularity of the website. Backlinks are considered as votes by search engines: more the number of votes (backlinks) your website has, and based on the importance of websites linking back to yours, your site is assigned a trust rank.

Backlinks today are an important part of the SEO process because when you build quality backlinks, your website stands a higher chance of getting indexed faster by the search engines. Also, from the long term perspective, it will help in boosting quality traffic to your site. Apart from this, building backlinks serves your bottom-line of website visibility by improving your page ranking and ultimately your ranking in the search engines.

Additionally, it is not just enough to have lots of backlinks, but, it’s also the quality of backlinks that helps in achieving a better ranking in search engines. When calculating the relevance of a website to a particular keyword, search engines usually take into consideration the number of quality backlinks to that website.
Search engines like Google give a lot of importance to websites that contain more number of quality backlinks and also consider those websites as more relevant when compared to others in search results.

A backlink is considered as a quality link if:

a) It links back to your site with the keyword which you are optimizing for.

b) The website linking back to yours has the same theme as your website – this means that when your website contains an inbound link from another site, and that site has content related to your website, this inbound link will be considered as more relevant to your website. However, if this inbound link comes from a site that is totally unrelated to your site content, then it is considered as a less relevant backlink. Therefore, higher the relevancy of backlinks, the greater will be their quality.

For instance, if you have a website about furniture and you receive an inbound link from another website also containing furniture, then this backlink will be considered more relevant and of higher quality when compared to a backlink from a florist website.

Today, search engines watch out for websites that build quality backlinks slowly over time. Though it is quite easy to maneuver links on webpage’s in order to attain a high ranking, it is much tougher to manipulate search engines with inbound links from other sites. This is also one of the reasons for backlinks gaining increased importance in search engine algorithms. Recently, search engines assessment for quality backlinks has become even tougher as there are many webmasters out there who make use of unethical techniques and deceive search engines to attain a higher ranking. These techniques are not only illegitimate but can also lead to your site getting banned.

Lastly, building quality backlinks could be a very time consuming and tedious process requiring a lot of patience, efforts, and also funds. However, it is a crucial step in creating blogs or any website since the quality and relevancy of backlinks can determine the success or failure of the site. Therefore, it is very important that you prioritize this in your SEO activity and hire professional SEO experts to whom you can outsource this task and achieve a better search engine ranking.

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In the past my best backlink tool was the use of article marketing. I generated backlinks using article marketing by submitting 3 articles to a minimum of 50 directories every week. Using this strategy I was able to triple my backlinks because many of the articles that I submitted was picked by other directories or website owners looking for content for their websites. The process of generating backlinks while using article marketing generally takes few months. Lately with the use of a social bookmarking software, I am able to generate hundreds of backlinks daily.

The social bookmarking software I am talking about is able to post to hundreds of social networking and social bookmarking websites like Digg, Facebook, Sphinn with just one click. Being able to submit to so many high PR ranking social networks is like having the best of both worlds. One benefit is that you will receive high quality backlinks and the other hand you will also generate more traffic to your website. I use these social networks to announce every time I submit a new blog post or article to the directories.

In addition to the obvious possibilities of traffic generation and backlink building, there are other advantages to social networking websites. If you are lucky enough to have your article or blog post make the front page of some of these social networks, you just might need a new server. There have been many stories of servers crashing due to too much traffic from social networks such as Digg, Sphinn and Stumble Upon.

It took me a while to learn how to take advantage of these social networking websites, but I am glad I took time out to catch up with the rest of the world. Web 2.0 strategies has introduced internet marketing to whole new masses of people, adding these strategies to my backlink building arsenal has created better results with less time.

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These are nothing more than incoming links to your website and can be called anything from inbound or inward links to backlinks or incoming links. It’s basically when another site owner or webmaster places a link on his site that directs his readers to your site.

Backlinks are seen by the major search engines as a vote for your site and for this reason they are greatly sought after and are very important to your presentence on the web.

The main reason that backlinks have become extremely popular over the years is due to the way the major search engines treat them. They are like gas for your car and content is like the size of the engine. While having a large powerful engine is very important if you ain’t got no gas you want get very far.

It is imposable to rank for a competitive keyword without backlinks however, very possible to rank for a competitive keyword with nothing more than backlinks. Think of it like this, every time you use a keyword on your site it’s a vote for that keyword. When Google lands on your site they see the keyword “backlinks” and assumes the content is about backlinks.

You’re only able to use the keyword so many times in your content before it starts looking crazy. Let’s say you manage to use the keyword a total of 25 times. Your competition then uses the keyword in the content on his site 26 times and ranks higher then you in the search engines.

There is a point where your site will get penalized for using the keyword to many times in the text.

Then I come along and use the keyword a couple times in my text but then get other sites to link to me using the keyword in the anchor text from all the sites that are linking to me. Google then counts and says that you guys used it 25 and 26 times however I used it 110 because I have over a hundred sites linking to me. So…I outrank you all. As time goes on others figure out what I’m doing and begin doing the same thing before long your site is no longer showing up in the search engines for any of the good keywords.

Backlinks do more than just get your site showing up for the keywords in the major search engines; they also drive traffic to your site. And when you start getting backlinks the idea is not to just get backlinks but to get backlinks that drive traffic.

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The purpose of having backlinks as an element of page rank algorithm is that people will want to link to pages that have quality content. The more the number of backlinks a site has, the better it is. However, practically speaking, you cannot be relying on the fact that your website content is of high quality and therefore people will link to it.

No doubt if your site has the most relevant and high quality content, you can get many quality backlinks including from websites that contain themes similar to yours. Nonetheless, getting such inbound links may not always be easy and require a lot of efforts, therefore, you may want to look out for other ways to get quality backlinks.

Ways to Build Your Backlinks
Even if you manage to get lots of backlinks in a natural way, it is never a bad idea to welcome additional quality inbound links. There are several ways for acquiring backlinks which may be ethical while other ways may be illegitimate and unacceptable and can lead to your site being penalized in the long run. The legitimate ways of getting backlinks include directory submissions, forum posting, linking to other blogs, press releases, etc. Among the unacceptable ways are linking to link farms, buying links in large quantities, getting linked to websites hosting illegal content, linking to other websites that belong to the same person, etc.

To start building backlinks, the first step would be to identify sites from where you can acquire quality backlinks. This can be done with the help of Backlink Builder tool which generates a list of websites on entering keywords. Once you get the list of potential sites where you can post messages, articles, or backlinks to your website, the choice is up to you to visit these sites and start posting your content along with an inbound link to your website in it.

You may have a question about how websites generated by the backink building tool can provide backlinks free of cost. The answer to your question simply lies in the fact that such sites need content for their site. With you posting and feeding them with content without getting paid for it, helps you to get free quality backlinks in return from them. It is like free trading where you offer something required by others for free and get what you want for free. However, this free trading lasts as long as you post your content to sites that are respected and also as long as you do not end up posting fake content.

Below are some of the most successful methods that can be used to build backlinks.

Directory Submission
Getting your site listed in various directories is one of the basic steps that you should start with in your efforts to build backlinks. It may be unlikely to get any significant traffic through directories; however, the idea here is to get backlinks to improve your page ranking.

There are several directories to which your site can be submitted. These can range from general directories, blog directories, SEO friendly directories to non-reciprocal directories (directories that allow you to list your website in their directory even if you do not link back to them). Additionally, it is important that you submit your site to only those directories that have a high page rank.

It is also important to know that listing a site in directories is a time consuming process as it requires you to first find out quality directories to which you want to submit your site. Once this is done, you have to search through the categories and sub categories in these directories to find out the specific category to which your website belongs. Therefore, keeping the time constraint in mind, it is a good idea to hire a professional SEO company that provides directory submission services so that you can save time and concentrate your efforts and resources on your other core business functions.

Forum or Blog Posting and Article Directories
Forum posting and Blog posting is another way of getting quality backlinks to your site because search engines usually index forums as well. Getting backlinks from blogs or forums that are reputed can be very helpful. However, at times there could be a possibility of your post being edited or deleted by the forum administrator if they find that your posting does not adhere to the forum policy. Moreover, there may be times when the administrators may not allow any links in posts until they are totally relevant.

While posting in forums and blogs can be done faster and require lesser efforts, submission of articles to various directories can take a very long time since articles are longer when compared to posts and also involve a though process to write them. However, it would still be worth the time and effort in the long run.

Press Releases and News Announcements
Though this is not a day to day practice to build quality backlinks, it does fetch good results if done the right way. There are several websites out there which publish press releases or news announcements free of cost or may charge a fee. A press release that is well written can boost visitor traffic to your site and also a backlink from a reputed site to your site is a value addition to your entire SEO efforts. However, a press release can be used as a medium only if there is something newsworthy. That is the reason why press releases and news announcements do not factor in as a daily way to build backlinks.

Content Exchange
Content exchange can also be very helpful in getting you quality backlinks. For example, you can provide free RSS feeds to websites that are interested in them. When your RSS feed gets published by the other site, you will get an inbound link to your website. This will also drive a lot of visitor traffic that will visit your website to get more details on the headlines and abstract they read on this other site.

Creating Quality Content
Creating professional and quality content is also very important to get more backlinks to your site. This is because content that is well written is always noticeable and there would be more number of people who would want to link to it.

Leaving Comments
To create awareness and get visibility for your site, you can also leave comments on others blogs. Leaving comments that are appealing to read will always have a good chance of drawing the attention of more people to your site.

Practices to Avoid While Building Backlinks
There are several ways in which links can be built, however, it is important to realize that certain link building ways can ruin your SEO efforts. One such practice to avoid is link exchange, wherein, when you place a link on another website, that website in return will place a backlink to your website. There are a few things to be considered with this concept of link exchanging. First is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Having more outbound links than inbound links is not good. Second, there could be a possibility of your link partner being a link farm. In this case, your site can get penalized or banned by search engines as link farms are considered as unethical SEO practice.

Additionally, you must also be careful about linking to sites that are suspicious or host illegal content. Though search engines will not penalize you for having backlinks from such websites, since you do not have control over what they link to, linking with such sites can ruin your SEO efforts.

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Google largely values backlinks that your website may have from some other relevant websites with barely any outgoing links. Generating backlinks is still very important to gain Search Engine trust and to boost up your rankings. So, it would be good, if you find any way to get few backlinks for your site from relevant sites.

But, it is not always possible to get backlinks from the relevant site as other sites are your competitors and why would they provide a link to your website?

With the motive of clearing out illegitimate techniques of SEO employed by black hat users, Google has given a set of restrictions that prohibit black hat users from using their techniques to play with Google’s Algorithms. And, one prominent restriction among these is: Google does not consider any backlinks from other websites hosted on the same C Class IP as yours.

If you want only to increase the Page Rank of your website for flipping, then multiple C Class IP hosting is not the one you want to waste your time on. But, if you’re looking to rank your website for a particular keyword, if highly targeted traffic is what you are craving for then multiple C Class IP hosting is the best thing for you.

C Class IP Explained

Basically, an IP consists of 4 parts: Class A, B, C, D divided by “.”. These numbers are given to identify a particular network and a host on that network.

Now, as we mentioned above that Google does not count backlinks from websites that are hosted on IP Addresses in the same IP C Class as your website is hosted, it might get little complicated for utilizing backlinks for ranking. However, this trick surely has a solution. What you can do is create your own websites and trick Google into counting the backlinks.

Simply, you need to create websites on different C classes and place your backlinks on them. The entire procedure is extremely simple, provided you arrange for Multiple C Class web hosting. Once you avail this requirement, all you have to do is registering 10 different domain names in accordance with the niche of your website.

Create WordPress blogs on each domain and craft exclusive, keyword rich articles for these blogs. And then easily get your keywords hyperlinked and backlinks them to your website.

When it comes to boosting your position on SERPs, these backlinks work wonders. They efficiently boost your search engine rankings for your specific keywords as you have backlinks from 10 different websites all of which have low outbound links. This step increases your trust rank amazingly and opens a huge funnel for traffic from Search Engines.

Hence, Multiple C Class IP Hosting is a successful way to enhance your search engine rankings. However, link building is somewhat an expensive option but Multiple C Class IP hosting makes it simple and effective for low budget webmasters.

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There are many factors that decide your position on the search engines. The higher you are on the search engines, the more inclined people will be to click on your website. Conveniently enough, backlinks are one of the top things search engines look at when rating your website.

In case you are an internet newbie, backlinks are the links scattered around the web that point back to your site. You will find these links on forums, blogs, and any other websites that are willing to put your link on it. The more backlinks you have around the internet, the better chance you have of increasing your traffic volume.

If you think about it, your site is worthless if nobody knows about it. That is like having the worlds largest Wal-Mart in the middle of the desert and not telling anybody about it; you probably will not get much business. But having backlinks scattered across the internet will get the word out about your website. As someone runs across it on another site, they may click on the link and be directed to your site.

Now that you know what backlinks are and how they can benefit you, you probably want to know how to get them. There are several effective methods to getting backlinks pointing toward your website. The most popular and well known method is link trading. This consists of you trading your link to someone else for their link. This requires you to place their link somewhere on your website in agreement that they will place your link on their website.

If you truly want to benefit from this method, try to trade links only with websites that have a page rank the same as yours or higher. This will stand out to the search engines and increase your rank.

Another method is writing articles and submitting them to directories. The way this becomes a quality backlink is through the resource box at the bottom of the article. You are allowed to write a couple sentences about yourself or your business and place a link to your website in the resource box. As you submit your articles to thousands of article directories, people can click on your link.

These are a couple of the more effective methods to getting backlinks, but there is a plethora of other ways including posting in forums and sending out newsletters or chain emails. Whatever methods you opt to use, it is essential that you have as many quality backlinks pointing back to your site as possible.

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