The Link Wheel Workbook

If you have gained an insight into the SEO world, you would have come across the word “backlinks” several times. For those new to the SEO industry, you might wonder what backlinks are and how essential they are for the success of websites.

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.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

It is imperative that website owners recognize the value of owning a site that is highly ranked and visible for search engine results. In the mid- 1990’s, webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines. This is currently referred to as search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is simply the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website for search engines using “natural” (”organic” or algorithmic”) search results. Specifically, if a site is presented prior to others within a search result or “ranks” higher than others, then that particular website would be visited more frequently. Historically, search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation because they were forced to rely solely on factors that were exclusively within a webmasters control. Therefore in order to provide better results for their users, search engines had to adapt by developing intense complex ranking algorithms that webmasters could no longer manipulate. SEO is also capable of identifying a variety of searches to include image search, local search, and industry- specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy, SEO is used to increase a site’s relevance. The SEO recognizes how search organics work and what people are searching for. It also initiates efforts to include unique content to a site to ensure that its content is easily indexed by search engine robots, making it more appealing to users. Other techniques are the Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. Before distinguishing these techniques, however, one must have knowledge of the three major search engines on the internet. The leading and most marketable search engine is Google. Yahoo and MSN bring up the rear. The majority of the people who “surf” the internet use Google. More over, every search engine on the web has personal algorithms to implement a method for evaluating the importance of your website. Specifically, they have to optimize their website according to detailed guidelines. One type of individual within the SEO may follow the guidelines of these search engines, others may not. Subsequently, it is a necessity to identify the difference between the Black Hat SEO and the White Hat SEO.

SEO techniques are basically classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of an impressive design and those techniques that search engines greatly disapproves of; which are referred to as spamdexing. The Black Hat SEO technique is used by people that demonstrate intent to deceive the search engine. They feel that the search engine is their enemy. Unfortunately, these people refuse to follow the rules and use unethical measures to achieve top ranking. The Black Hat SEO uses text that is hidden or color disguised or it may use a method that is referred to as cloaking. The White Hat SEO is an ethical way of search engine optimization. It creates content for users, not for search engines. Furthermore, it makes that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempt to deliberately deceive the algorithm. Upon the discovery of Black Hat techniques, search engines may penalize sites by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from the database.

One of the best tools that most web business owners can utilize is the search engine optimization. The SEO will make the most out of your business online. SEO is significant in that it has the power to increase the website traffic while simultaneously improving your sales. Website business owners have the opportunity to obtain an advantage over the online competition. Ironically, many owners are not familiar with SEO and its benefits; therefore they are apt to commit mistakes in the attempt to utilize such a program.

One of the prominent mistakes that web business owners commit is the extensive time dedicated to their website design and not enough time on the content. Primarily focusing on the content will entice more people to visit the website. Instead of spending money on site design, invest in copywriting. Committing to this will certainly benefit the online business as the search engines will reward websites that offer fresh content to their visitors, regardless of its format. However, if it is the owner’s intent to solely improve search engine optimization rankings, perhaps they should post blogs or forums that visitors can use to interact with others. A web business owner must also offer something unique within site’s content. The owner should be able to properly optimize the site so that it is interesting to your targeted market.

Another mistake is the inappropriate keyword phrases. In order to optimize successfully, the owner has to select correct keywords that your customers may use in their search on the web. This is especially essential for small to medium sized businesses. Basically, if the keywords or phrases are not specifically related to your customers’ desires, your website doesn’t appear in the search results. Remember to be descriptive as possible which not only helps the visitors, but the actual online business. Use the words that are related to your content which is called keyword optimization.

The two terms “search engine optimization” and search engine marketing” (SEM) are often used interchangeably. However, the terms have different functions. The SEO is a component of SEM whereas it is a function of the SEM process or campaign. Again, SEO is the process of optimizing a website for search engine listing. The SEM, however, is a form of internet marketing that acknowledges and promotes websites by increasing their visibility within the search engine results page. The methods of SEM include SEO, paid placement, paid inclusion and pay- per- click campaigns which offer the advantage of immediacy.

A popular way of improving your ranking in the search engines is to ensure that your site is important. This can be established through link building. Link building is a measure used to persuade other websites to link to your personal site, thereby increasing your “link popularity.” This process is imperative in attempts to increase your ranking in the search engines. This is also a strategy that is resistant to manipulation while justifying a website’s importance. Consequently, the link building process receives high priority within the internet marketing campaign. Search engine marketing is also a powerful tool for a business owner inbound links to a website by writing articles. These articles should be submitted to article syndication websites where other webmasters are free to use the articles on their sites. The key is to include a link to your website with your signature.

Search engine optimization may not be an appropriate strategy for every website. More so, additional search engines referrals does not guarantee more sales. Also, internet marketing strategies can be effective, depending on the site operators’ goals. Any successful internet marketing campaign can drive organic search results to pages, but it may also require paid advertisement and continued referrals.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Quality backlinks play a critical role in the field of search engine optimization and can have a tremendous impact on the amount of traffic that you generate. Without backlinks pointing to your site, it can be extremely difficult generating traffic on a daily basis. This will give you the ability to continuously drive in new traffic day after day.

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.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Those in the Internet business, especially those in Search Engine Optimization, are very familiar with backlinks. Also known as inbound or inward links, backlinks are the incoming links to your website. They are links in other websites that direct readers to your site. Backlinks reveal how popular or important your website it, thus, they are very important.       

One particular reason why backlinks are important is the way they are used by search engines. Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN use backlinks to determine just how important a website is. They use backlinks, among other factors, to assess if a website is relevant enough to appear in the page results of a particular search inquiry. The more backlinks you have, the better the chances that Google of Yahoo will consider your website relevant. It follows then that the more backlinks you have, the more visitors you will  get.

Once you become aware how important backlinks are, it is time to focus on creating them. This is very easy. One way to do this is to leave your link when you comment on blogs. Of course, it is not enough to comment on just any blog. Choose blogs with content that is remotely related to the content of your website. This way, you are building quality backlinks. Another way to create backlinks is to post links together with your signature when you comment on forums. Submitting your URL to directories is another great way to create backlinks.

Creating backlinks may seem like an exhausting part of managing your website but it will be worth it. Backlinks determine your website’s popularity and this is something any webmaster should focus on.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites