Building Backlinks For Better Website Rankings

The term "link popularity" is one you hear often when optimizing websites for the search engines is being discussed. Link popularity refers to the number and authority of links there are out on the internet which point to your website. The more links there are which direct readers to your website, the more important search engines believe your website must be. These links are referred to by search engine optimization experts (SEOs) as backlinks.

There are many methods of obtaining backlinks to your website. You can exchange links with other webmasters. You can pay other website owners to link to your site. You can write articles and submit them to article directories. You can create more websites of your own and link from one site to another. All these take a lot of time and/or money but are still very valuable methods of building backlinks.

Because time is one of the most valuable commodities, the best strategy to get the most out of your backlink building program is to have a detailed plan of action to achieve the most bang for your buck. Although every link pointing to your site is a positive factor, creating too many links from websites which are new, spammy, unranked or which mark your links with the "no-follow" attribute wastes both your time and your effort.

The most important search engine, Google, employs a system in which they place a weighting factor on each website. This weight is referred to as "Pagerank". For example, a link from a prominent news website will carry more weight than a link from John Smith's personal blog that he hasn't updated in 14 months. The higher the pagerank of the website which links to yours, the higher the quality of the link and the more authority it passes along to your site. The goal of a manual link building campaign should be to place your links on pages which rank higher than yours.

In order to impress the search engines, the number of links to your website should grow at a slow and steady rate. Links should be directed toward all the interior pages of your website and not just your homepage. If one of your link building tactics is submitting articles, you can increase the value of those article links by a link building campaign on behalf of your articles. Make a point of building more backlinks every day and your website will soon develop the traffic you are looking for.

What is SEO? It's an acronym that stands for "Search Engine Optimization".

SEO is of course search engine optimization and search engine optimization is the process of optimizing, or making your site good for, natural search engine rankings. I use the term natural search engine rankings to simply differentiate SEO from the purchased, or sponsored search engine rankings.What is SEO? It's an acronym that stands for "Search Engine Optimization".

Search engine optimization is the process of creating factors which lead to optimal natural search engine rankings for your website. The term natural search engine rankings refers to those rankings achieved due to search engine algorithms rather than from purchased, or sponsored, search engine rankings.

So which factors are important in search engine optimization?

There are two primary areas of search engine optimization - on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is chiefly performed on the web page itself. On-page SEO is the least important part of the optimization process. At least it is the easiest part of the process to accomplish. On-page SEO includes items such as building a sitemap and optimizing the title, the keywords, the description, and the contents in such a way that search engines properly read and index the contents of your website.

Off-page SEO is the creation of inbound links from other highly ranked or that are themselves optimized for the website, keyword or keyword phrase. This is commonly referred to as link building. When the search engines see that there are many inbound links to your web page that have similar topics to your web pages they will assume that your web page is viewed by others as being a respected source of information on the subject.

Properly done link building is the key element of search engine optimization. The factor which makes the difference between your website receiving very little traffic, or thousands of daily visitors.

Some techniques which effectively build inbound links to your website include:

• Getting other website owners to link to your site because they like your content.


• Submitting your site to directories.


• Submitting your site's RSS feed to RSS directories.


• Article Marketing


• Social bookmarking


• Submitting press releases


• Building free Web 2.0 feeder sites