How the heck do you get your website listed in those top ten search results for your keywords? Because let’s face it, your search engine position is key if you want free traffic. Beyond the first page of results, you might as well be invisible.
Think about it this way: what do the search engines want? They want to give quality search results to searchers. Since humans don’t go out and index the gazillions of pages and organize them by keyword, the search engines have other ways of grouping results. Have you ever wondered just how how a search engine can tell what a “good” webpage is for a given search term?
For example, say you had a webpage about “handmade lampwork glass beads”. How would Google or Yahoo decide where to index it? And what if there were 20,000 pages about “handmade lampwork glass beads”? How would the search engines decide which pages to put in the top ten?
Inbound links, that’s how. An inbound link (or backlink) is any link to your site from another website or internet location. Inbound links are part of the algorithm that Google uses to rank your website because each one is sort of like a “thumbs up” from others in the internet community.
If you want to increase your search engine ranking and overall search engine optimization, then you want to maximize the number of inbound links to your site. If you are a blogger and you include links to relevant sites and resources, then you are giving that source a backlink. Gaining inbound links is a crucial part of your overall blogging and website marketing and search engine optimization strategy.
Are All Inbound Links Created Equal?
Quality counts in backlink world. Search engines value quality backlinks and therefore it is important to be aware of the most effective types of backlinks and which ones are frowned upon by the various search engines. Link farms, link swaps and purchasing links are all areas that you want to avoid.
If you decide to take the risk and buy your backlinks anyway, be very cautious. They may very well not be worth the time or money it takes to build them. In fact, they could significantly damage your site if Google were to decide they frown on your links.
Not only do you not want to be penalized for the obviously purchased link, you also want links that look natural. They shouldn’t be all the same, and they shouldn’t all have the same text around them, and you definitely don’t want hundreds to show up all at once. Slowly build up links over time from diverse sources. Forum posting, blog commenting, article marketing, and guest blogging are all common link building strategies.
The Best Way to Create Backlinks
The single best way to increase your backlinks and make your search engine position climb is to offer great content. When you offer your readers well written, relevant and interesting content, they will want to link to your site and in doing so expose you to more and more readers. Focus your efforts on offering your readers a site they value and read regularly. It will prove to be the most effective strategy for building links to your site.
Do you have a favorite backlink or search engine position strategy? Share yours by commenting below.
P.S. Here’s what I’m reading right now: Link Building Made Easy. I’m learning more about building backlinks from a mom who built over 50,000 incoming links to one website in under 2.5 years. Pretty cool.
