How to Use Backlinks to Climb the Page Ranking
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.
