This is intended as a beginners guide for anyone looking to build backlinks. If you are an expert backlink builder, read on - because there may be some information here that is useful to you as well.

Backlinks are simple links that point back to your website. Each link has an anchor text like “click here” or something more relevant like the name of the site that the link is linking to. Building backlinks is one of the most fundamental parts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Webmasters: When you are building a quality web-page, it’s important to build quality backlinks that are relevant to the theme of your site. It’s important to build these quality relevant links because top link popularity is a big factor for the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

When building backlinks it is very important to vary the anchor text of your links. It’s recommended to naturally come up with phrases that describe your site, or you can even use misspellings on occasion.

Contrary to popular belief, trading reciprocal links do not hold as much weight as a one way link back to your site. Get links from sites that have high page rank and make sure they are pointing directly at you without a “no follow” tag in the source code of the link.

It is important to build backlinks at a slow rate…don’t rush out and get thousands of links pointing to your site, but rather build them at a slow pace. You want to consistently link to the same place on your site- like your front page for example, but also do not forget a few different important sub-pages. Keep your links pointing to your site as long as you can. It wil take months for the search engines to react to these links in search queries. Vary your links, but build links to your main page more than anything else. Build backlinks from different IP addresses is important as well. Make sure you are aware of the number of outbound links that are coming from your own site, and try to always keep the outbound links lower than your inbound links. You can always track your links pointing to your site in Google by typing “link:http://yoursitehere.com”

When it comes to directories: Try to get a natural listing in the Yahoo directory or a paid listing. Only pay for the directory listing if you know you are going to get traffic from it. Try for a listing in DMOZ.org - it is a search engine that many other search engines feed off of. Lastly, stay out of “link farms” and “free for all’s”.

Posted on March 15th, 2007 by Firelead Affiliate Network
Filed under: Google, SEO, Webmasters, Yahoo