If you’re wondering what a back link is, well it is a link placed on another site with content relevant to yours that is directed towards your website. Links to your website direct traffic from the linking point to your site and help you to rank higher in search engines.
Let’s say that you have a website that sells grills. To get the most effective links to your site you would want to find other sites that offer content similar to grills to place your link on. These other sites might sell books on grilling, offer recipes for grilling or grill parts. The linking site will ideally have content that relates to grilling in some way.
You should view the internet as a popularity contest and each little link is a vote for your websites quality. Links of quality are much more effective than links in quantity. 10 links from websites with content related to that on your site could be more valuable than 1000 links from unrelated sites.
The links placement on the relevant site is also important. You are better off with a link on the front page of a website than a page that is deep within the site. Ideally you should be able to get to the page your link is placed on by clicking on a link from the front page. Look at it in this way, if you can’t find the link neither can the search engines.
We should also cover two different ways to get a link placement.
Free link placement involves several options. There are some sites that will offer free link placement with no strings. Other sites will require a reciprocal link back from your site which decreases the link value significantly. You can also write and submit articles to article directories with a link back to your site.
There are quality directories where you can have your website listed. A quality one that actually provides benefits to the website linked to will generally charge a fee to review your site in consideration of inclusion. This is generally one of the most time effective ways to achieve good results.
Another option is paid link placement. This is purely paying for advertising space on a website. It is an option but should be very carefully done. The primary consideration for this option is for generating traffic via the link itself. Search engines are becoming better at detecting paid links and are making requirements of specialized no follow tags to be placed in them which takes away many of the linking benefits other than traffic from the link itself. If you choose this option be careful that you understand how to do it properly and the risks if you don’t.
When you do get a link back to your website, having relevant text in the link itself is important. This is what will help you to rank in search engines for relevant keywords. When a search engine comes across the link it will note the link text and try to match it with the content of your site. The better a match the more relevance that link will be given by the search engine.
Link building from quality sites does take time. You are not going to start today and finish up tomorrow. It takes a consistent, focused approach over time to see results that give you the results you’re looking for over the long term.
