What are backlinks and why do I need them?

Backlinks essentially are other sites that point to yours.  When site A links to your site, you now have a ‘backlink’.  Ok that’s pretty simple… so why do I need them?

To generate traffic the easy (well… cheap) way – through search engines – you want to rank high.  How do you rank high in the search engines?  By having relevant and powerful backlinks.  The better and more backlinks you have, the better and more relevant your site must be!  Or so says the google algorithm.

ohhh, ok now I see.  Well I don’t think I have that many backlinks at all.. how do I know if I do?

One very very easy way to check is by using Yahoo Site Explorer.  This is a great tool that will allow you to see the backlinks of not just your site, but also of your competitors sites.  That is a very powerful thing to know.  Once you can see the competition, you will know if you’ll be able to conquer that position they are in or not.

Well it doesn’t seem that I have very many backlinks and I’m not ranking too well for my keywords..  how do I get more?

Here is a list of a few easy ways to get backlinks

• Web 2.0 Sites
• Blog Commenting
• Link Exchanges

Those are all extremely easy to do and all that is requires is taking action.

Web 2.0 Sites

These are the new crave of sites that allow you to sign up and follow the theme of the site.  Sites such as Squidoo.com are for making ‘lenses’ where you can make your own personal page about anything you want.  Well, we have a great way to take advantage of that.

Start by making your own lens about whatever you blog is about.  Then throw in a link or two to your homepage.  Now what has this accomplished?  You now have 2 backlinks coming to your site from a very popular and powerful site (google likes this) and you now have a whole new page promoting your blog.

A few other sites such as these are:

• Wordpress.com – Create your own blog
• Blogger.com – Create your own blog
• HubPages.com – Create your own Hub Page

There are so many more but these are a few you can start with.  All that you’ll want to do is create a small informative page/blog about whatever you are blogging about and post links back to your main site.  This creates a large web of sites all revolving around your main blog.

Blog Commenting

This is a new one I just picked up.  Go into your Google account, and if you haven’t already made one make one NOW!!, and check out the Google Alerts.  Put your Google Alert settings to this:

Google Alerts Settings

This will send you a list of blogs that write about your keyword every day.  With this awesome resource coming to you everyday you can then go into each blog that is sent to your e-mail and write a comment about the article.  Try to make the comment valuable.  Don’t just go in and say hey great post and leave.  Offer something that will make the administrator want to keep your comment there.

Now what is the purpose of this?  Yes you are right, it creates backlinks.  Not only that but when you comment on a blog you can use your name as your anchor text and link it right back to your homepage.  This is very important in dominating specific keywords.

Link Exchanges

This is the easiest of all of them to do.  What you do is search for your keyword and on the front page contact all the webmasters you can and ask them for reciprocal links.  While not all will say yes, the ones that will do it will create a huge amount of backlinks for you that will help juice up your site.

There you have it!  A few tips to get you started in getting your blog ranked.  If you have any questions or comments just leave us a comment below and we’ll get back to you ASAP.