Backlink Your Way To The #1 Spot In The Search Engines
Do you know what a backlink is? A backlink is a html link that is directed to your website from an external site. Backlinks are very important to your Search Engine Optimization of your website. Most of the time your backlinks link to your home page but occasionally they will link to an internal page within your site. This is called "deep linking" and will increase the rankings of those internal pages in the search engines.
The greater the number of backlinks pointing to your website, the more the search engines will appreciate and trust the content on your site. The original Google algorithm placed a very high importance on backlinks when calculating where to place your site in the search engine result pages (SERP's). In today's algorithm, the calculation used for backlinks is much more complicated and does not carry the same weight that it did then.
Google uses the backlinks to calculate a value called PageRank (PR). Many SEO experts feel that the PR value isn't necessarily the most important factor for ranking high in the SERP's. There are so many factors that go into the algorithm that it has become very difficult to guess what Google is really looking at. However, we do know that backlinks have remained a constant over the years.
Additional terms for describing backlinks are: inlinks, inbound links, inward links, and incoming links. These terms are all used interchangeably.
Backlinks can be used to find related websites that have linked to you, gauge your website popularity (or someone else's), and view what others may have written about the page being linked. When looking for the quantity of backlinks to your site, Yahoo is much better at reporting the real backlinks.
To hide the inner workings of the Google search engine algorithm, Google has refused to show you all of the sites that they know about that link to your site. Google will only show a partial list of those backlinks. Also remember that individual pages that have your backlink on them may not have the current PR calculated and may end up with a much higher PR during the next update.
The long term premise behind using backlinks was that the site pointing to yours is voting for you. At one time that vote had a very significant impact. However, over time, all the search engines are becoming more sophisticated and put less weight on this backlink vote. More recently they are putting significant emphasis on the content and context of the page being linked to and linked from. Pages with little to know relevance to each other end up counting very little.
When you are trying to get more backlinks to your site, there are a number of different methods to gain those links. Some of the more effective ones are :
1. Web Directories
2. Website Link Directories (some are paid and many are free)
3. Adding meaning full comments to related forums and blogs
4. Purchased links (currently frowned upon by Google)
5. Link Exchanges (not as effective when they are reciprocal)
Hint: You want your backlinking strategy to appear natural to the search engines so you need to make sure that you are acquiring backlinks on more than just high PR web pages. There are significantly more low PR pages on the web then there are high PR pages.
What's the final result of your backlink efforts? More visitors to your site and if your site is selling something then hopefully more cash in your pocket. You should expect to get more visitors from the natural search engine results for keywords that you target as well as visitors that follow your backlinks from wherever they occur. Always try to make the backlink context be something that will invite the page visitor to click your backlink and visit your site.
Article Source: http://www.search-raven.com
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by: AnthonyStai
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