Back links: Article marketing's backbone
Article marketing can be an effective way to build your company's online presence. But to maximize its potential, remember to use Back links. Back links are also known as incoming links, inbound links or IBLs. Think of them as the reverse of hyper links: Hyper links take users from your site to another. Back links take users from another site back to yours.
Back links are links received by web directories and websites from other directories and websites. Search engines use them to determine a website's ranking. That is, when you enter a keyword into your favorite search engine, one way the search engine decides which site is at the top of its list is by the number of Back links it has.
Back links build on quality. If your website is a good one, people will start linking their sites to it. This of course builds traffic to your website and thereby builds your business. The trick is to build Back links to get the ball rolling.
There are good and bad ways to build Back links into your website. The best way is to get quality Back links from websites similar to yours. For example, if you are a financial advisor, ideally you'v like to get a Back links from another financial site. But how do you do that?
The most important factor to remember is that no one will back links to your site if it isn't any good. Spend the effort to make your efforts really shine.
One obvious way is to find a website that you like in a related field. Ask someone at that site to review your article and consider posting it. If it is quality work, it should be no problem for it to get posted when there is space available. After all, the webmaster there wants quality work on that site too.
One way is to get your article posted in an article directory or to a content exchange program that syndicates material. If your article is syndicated, such as in an RSS feed, your article is summarized on another site, with a Back links to your site. Visitors will then go to your site to get the full article.
Another technique to use is to publish a press release that happens to have a link to your website. When the press release is published, visitors will then use the Back links. However, be aware that press releases are intended to publish newsworthy events. If theres nothing newsworthy it will be ignored.
When you write a free article for web content, be sure to put a link to both the article itself and in the box at the end of it. This gives users two opportunities to link to your site, thereby creating a Back links opportunity.
It is important to note that when someone does back links to your site, make sure it is to something directly related to the subject discussed in the link article. For example, if the subject is banking, make sure the Back links goes to one of your articles on banking and not just your website. This will be of greater interest to the visitor.
If possible, offer a newsletter or another offer which will require the Back links user to register his or her email address with you. The whole point of article marketing and Back links is to drive visitors to your company and website. Don't lose a contact (and potential customer).
Remember that like anything worthwhile, building Back links will take time. It could take several months to get the word out about your article and your website. It sounds like a long time but in article marketing, as with any marketing, the time spent is worth it.
In each of these efforts, remember to refer to sites and directories that have high search engine rankings themselves. What better way to improve your ranking than to link yourself with another high-quality site?
While Back links are important to build interest in your article and website, it's important to use them correctly. Search engines have become quite adepts at scoping out poor Back links usage.
One of these involves link farms? Link farms are groups of several websites that have links to each other, solely with the intent of building their search engine rankings. Search engines frown on these because they do not offer the user real information.
In a nutshell, the best way to get quality Back links in article marketing or for your website is to use quality content and update it regularly. It may take extra effort but it is indeed worth it.
Posted in: SEO-Webmaster| Tags: SEO Webmaster Website BacklinksThe importance of Backlinks, part 2/2
For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.
Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine's algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine's criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.
Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let's talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.
There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.
We must be careful with our reciprocal links. There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We could begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being choosier with which we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don't have tons of outbound links on a page, or sites that don't practice black-hat SEO techniques, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won't be discounted.
Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven 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. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.
One thing is certain: interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you.
Posted in: SEO-Webmaster| Tags: SEO Webmaster Backlinks ImportanceThe Importance of Backlinks, Part 1/2
If you've read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you've come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.
Getting more traffic to a website or blog at little or no cost is something everyone wants. Adding natural incoming links without having to reciprocate provides a major boost to your site’s Google PageRank and search engine rankings. I'm sure those are goals of yours. It is also a fact that people surf the Internet looking for information.
By combining those two ideas, you can increase your visitor traffic to your site, and gain additional new backlinks at the same time. One proven way to achieve that traffic is to write articles in your area of expertise. You not only gain potential new visitor traffic, to convert into paying customers, but you also become recognized as an expert in your field. Through archiving, the articles can also serve as added valuable content, on your own website.
There are literally hundreds of Internet magazines, called "e-zines" and Internet newsletters, who would love your article. They have literally millions of information hungry subscribers, waiting to read about your ideas. There are also many webmasters seeking fresh, keyword rich content to add to their websites. It's not as hard as you think.
What are "backlinks"? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL's). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.
When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.
10 Top Tips For Optimizing Your Websites Backlinks
Google is just as fast as the other search engines, but they do have their own methods. The main thing to understand is that Google is continuously updating its internal database of pages and links as they crawl the Web. However, the information in the Webmaster Tools console and the database used for the link: operator are only updated periodically.
This list will provide a better understanding on how to optimize this process. It will also show you how not to get ripped off by the webmasters who agree to putting your link on their site. Many will go to great lengths to ensure your website link has no real value or ‘link juice’. This prevents their web page leaking Pagerank by reducing the number of ‘dofollow’ outbound links on their page.
1. Look for high Pageranking sites PR3+, you will need a lot of PR0 links to make an impact. Also ensure the Pagerank is real. Look at Google’s cache of the page, fake Pagerank will show an entirely different website.
2. Ensure your link is anchor texted with your keywords e.g. Virtual SEO consultant
Though this is well know, it is seldom done effectively
3. Try to use different text combinations and keywords in your links. e.g. London dentist, dentist London, W1 dentist.
4. Ensure the link will be a permanent/static html links. Links from forum signatures for example will only last a few months.
5. Create links in text format only, do not use any form of graphics that might hinder the search engine bots from following the link.
6. Do not create links in framed pages. Google and other search engines do not like them.
7. If someone says they will put a link on their website for you, make sure the links are not in JavaScript – check the source code of the site. This can sometimes be hard to spot. Search engines will ignore this type of link.
8. The websites you are putting your link on must be live. It must also be cached by Google (Another devious method to hide your link is for the webmaster to use cloaking...when Googlebot comes sniffing it will be shown a different page with no links on).
9. Check Links do not go through a redirect script – your link may be on a page, but when you click on it you are taken to another site entirely.
10. Try to avoid Flash sites – though Google is getting better at spidering them now.
Posted in: SEO-Webmaster| Tags: SEO Website Backlinks Optimizing Website Google search tips websites optimizing top