Relevant Backlinks Boost Website Traffic

SEO is a collection of techniques used to make your site appear as relevant as possible to a set of keywords. When people search for information of the web, they go to a search engine website like Google and enter a set of search terms into the search text field. After clicking the submit button, the search engine uses its own set of complicated calculations on its own server to identify the set of webpages that it believes are most relevant to the search terms. Since most people who want to find information on the web will go to search engines as their first step in finding that information, website owners who want the world to see their website will want to do whatever they need to do in order to have their website included in that group of websites. Search Engine Optimization encompasses all the techniques that webmasters must use to achieve that goal.

SEO techniques can be divided into two categories:
- On-page techniques
- Off-page techniques
On page techniques consist of all the things that you can do directly to your own website to make it more appealing to search engines, such as making specific changes to your HTML code or adding a sitemap file to your website. Off-page techniques are centered around the task of "link building", which is the process of getting other websites to link to your website. SEO experts generally agree that off-page link building techniques provide you with 90% or more of the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. It is still important to use on-page techniques because they involve fairly easy changes to your own website and using them will definitely make a difference when combined with off-page techniques. But once you have made the most important on-page optimizations to your web pages, building links is by far the most important activity you must pursue to get your website ranked well.

So how does a webmaster go about getting backlinks for his website? There are two answers to this question. In this section we look at the way webmasters currently do this, which is incredibly time consuming, boring, repetitive, and costly. I call this the Traditional Way or (even better) the Hard Way. The Traditional Way consists of using a number of techniques for creating new content on someone else's website. For traditional websites (not blogs or forums), this means contacting the other webmaster and convincing him to place your link on his site. For blogs and forums, this involves commenting in open discussions, and hoping your comments get approved. Let's look at specific techniques in detail.

Connect With Top Related Websites
A technique that works well but is really difficult to do is to connect with the webmasters of related websites and find a way to get good content (with a link to your website) onto their website. Most webmasters don't ever try this because it requires some salesmanship and quite a bit of persistence to connect with other webmasters. You will only be able to do this if your website is a really high quality website with unique content. If your website is just a quickly-thrown-together affiliate review website, you won't have much of a chance of convincing most other top ranking websites that your site is worth linking to. The basic idea in this approach is to do a web search on your important keywords and find websites that have top rankings for these keywords. Try to find websites that don't directly compete with yours but offer a complementary service. Then scour that website for a support email address, and send an email to the webmaster offering to provide some service in exchange for him giving you a link. For example, you could offer to write an exclusive article for his website, and he could publish this article with an embedded link to your website. Many webmasters will consider this idea favorably because they get unique content for free and all they have to do is give you a link. On the other hand, many webmasters will just ignore your request so you will need to contact many webmasters to get any traction with this. And there is only a finite number of websites that rank highly enough to be of interest to you in this approach, so often you will need to exercise a great deal of patience and perseverance to make this work.

Exchanging Links
For many webmasters, exchanging links is the only technique they use (other than waiting and hoping for other websites to link to theirs because they want to). To get a link exchange, you send an email to the webmaster of another website and offer to put a link to his website on your website if he puts a link to your website on his website. Anyone who has tried this recently knows that only a small percentage of webmasters will ever actually respond to such requests. Furthermore, the search engines have downgraded the quality they attach to reciprocal links, so even when you are able to get one or two (after sending out hundreds of emails), they don't really count for much. They may help the search engine spiders find your site and get it indexed, but the links themselves won't help your page get ranked very highly. I know I don't even bother to reply to the hundreds of link exchange requests I get every week, because the end result just isn't worth the effort.

Directory Submissions
Another way to get links is to submit your website to online directories. A few directories (like Yahoo and DMOZ) are worth submitting to. However, Yahoo is expensive (about $300 per year) and DMOZ can take a year or more to review your site with no guarantee of inclusion. There are also thousands of other directories scattered across the web. Of course you can find these directories yourself (do a Google search for "website directory") and manually submit your website, but this is a ridiculously time consuming process. A slightly better way is to use any of the directory submission software packages you can find on the web. But the best way is simply to go to the DigitalPoint Forums and pay someone to do the submissions for you. Usually you can find someone offering to do the directory submissions for you to 1000 directories for anywhere between $40-$100.

It actually isn't a bad idea to use directory submissions as one component in your link building efforts, especially if you pay someone else to do all the grunt work involved. Backlinks from directories can indeed provide some amount of "juice" to increase your visibility in the search engines. However, directory links by themselves are not going to do all that much for you. In other words, you cannot just pay several people to submit your website to 10,000 niche directories and hope to get good search engine rakings. There are many problems with directory links such as
- directories often require reciprocal links
- directories often require you to pay for inclusion
- directories can take forever to evaluate your website
- directories will place your link on some obscure page buried deep in their site where spiders may not go.

So directory submissions are only a small part of the solution.

Article Marketing
Another technique that can work ok if you spend lots of time and/or money is article marketing. The basic idea is to write a large number of informational articles of approximately 500-600 words each and submit these articles to ezine websites like ezinearticles.com. For example, for a credit card website a webmaster might write articles on topics like "Avoiding Too Much Credit Card Debt", "Advantages of cash Back Credit Cards", or "Find the Best Visa Card For Your Needs." When you submit each articles to one or more ezine websites, you can put an author information box at the bottom of the article, and this information box can contain a link back to your website. With enough articles, you may end up getting links from a variety of ezine webpages, many of which may themselves rank fairly highly for your favorite keywords. So articles can help in two ways: first by providing backlinks, and second by giving you referral traffic from people who read the article on another website.
While article marketing can indeed work, it takes a large number of articles to work effectively. Just writing two or three articles won't do the trick, especially for competitive niches. Generally you will need to write 20-50 articles and submit them to the article sites over a month or two. Then you'll need to write a couple more articles each month to keep the process going. This will give you a small number of links and some referral traffic.

If you don't want to write all the articles yourself, you can go onto Elance and hire someone to write them for you. If you look around, you may be able to find people willing to do this for under $10 per article, but I have found that the quality of these articles is definitely correlated to the amount you pay per article. If you pay only $10 per article, you will almost certainly have to correct much of the grammar and content. At $20 per article, you are much more likely to get articles that can be publishes as-is. Of course, if you need 40 or 50 articles written the $20 per article makes the costs add up pretty fast.

Press Releases
A press release is a short article that announces some significant event regarding your website. For example, you can write a press release that announces the launch of your new website business, and later one that announces the achievement of some business milestone. You can submit a press release on sites like PRWeb or PRLeap. The problem with press releases is that you can't issue a large number of them, so they don't give you many backlinks.

Blog and Forum Commenting
One technique that webmasters use that can be a two edged sword is blog and forum commenting. The basic idea is to search on the web for blogs and/or forum websites that discuss topics relevant to your website. You can then comment on these blogs and post on these forums. This can be successful if you spend a large amount of time gaining the trust of other participants by providing only very useful and relevant comments. If you immediately go into sales mode, the other participants will avoid you like the plague and the blog owners will refuse to publish your comments. Too many webmasters fall into the trap of comment spamming, or uploading posts whose only purpose is to provide a backlink to their website Taking the blog spam approach to getting backlinks is a waste of your time.

Web 2.0 Websites
"Web 2.0" is the name often given to websites that have a social networking component. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Delicious, and so on generate most of their content from the site users themselves. You can indeed get some backlinks from some of these websites, such as StumbleUpon, Delicious, and other Social Bookmarking sites. The best way to do this is to go to the DigitalPoint Forums on Marketing Services and purchase these link building services there. But, like directory links, these links will only augment more substantial and reputable links from real websites. You can't have an entire linking strategy built around social bookmarking links.

The other well-known Web 2.0 websites have varying degrees of usefulness for link building. Creating a lens on Squidoo is also a good idea, although this is more for the referral traffic than for the value of the link. If you are a person in your teens or twenties, a profile on Facebook and MySpace might be useful for social networking, although probably not for outgoing links. In these and other social networking sites, the most important thing to remember is that these sites were designed to foster community and non-commercial expression, not for commercial activity. These companies have become very aggressive in shutting down anyone who tries to engage in obvious link building efforts and/or advertising efforts. So for most people, it is not useful to consider these sites for any serious backlink building effort.

Purchase Links
Because backlinks are so valuable to webmasters and their SEO efforts, many websites that already have good pagerank will sell text links on their websites. Link brokers like text-link-ads.com and tnx.net allow website link sellers to match up with websites that need links. The main problem with this approach is that the search engines (especially Google) hate it and are starting to seriously discount the practice. So it is perfectly possible for you to purchase a nice link on a pagerank 6 website (for a substantial amount of money) only to see no change at all in your pagerank or traffic because Google has paid no attention to that link. The problem is that the search engines can easily join these sites and view their link inventories to see which websites are selling individual links. They can then just discount links from these websites. Because the search engines are starting to come down on link broker sites, buying backlinks is no longer a viable strategy for the major portion of your link building efforts.

Summary of the Traditional (Hard) Approach
So as you can see, the traditional techniques for getting backlinks can take a great deal of time, effort and money to implement. Sending out hundreds or thousands of emails to other webmasters, posting on hundreds of forums, or writing article after article are all tasks that are about as tedious and time-consuming as one could imagine. Building links has become the most time consuming task that web business owners engage in. The onerous nature of the link building task is perhaps the main reason why website business owners fail to achieve their online objectives - the whole thing just becomes way too much effort. Furthermore, outsourcing the effort to someone on DigitalPoint Forums or similar places online can end up costing lots of money for only incremental returns. Do any of these traditional methods work? Yes, they do, if you put a sufficient amount of time and effort and money into them, and if you have a bit of luck. But the amount of effort required is so large that many webmasters end up saying "there has to be a better way to do this!"

And now there is.

NeuroLinker is a revolutionary software system that was designed to automate the process of getting relevant, one way backlinks to your website. I developed NeuroLinker over a period of about a year after I came across the backlink problem as a new webmaster myself. I realized that my strong technology background (PhD in Aerospace Engineering) and experience (25 years of experience in developing advanced algorithms and software systems) provided me with the knowledge and tools I needed to solve this huge problem. As part of my professional career, I spent about 8 years doing information retrieval research for a major software company in San Diego, and much of what I learned from this experience was directly applicable to solving this problem.

So how does NeuroLinker solve the backlink problem? The NeuroLinker service allows a large number of webmasters to sign up and submit their websites to the system. NeuroLinker will then use advanced algorithms to examine all the websites of all the users in the system and match up websites that have similar content. For example, websites about cell phones will be matched up with other websites about cellphones and similar technologies, websites about doll clothes will be matched up with websites about doll houses, etc. NeuroLinker will then use additional algorithms to interlink these websites using all one way links, i.e., no two websites will have a reciprocal link to each other. The end result is that webmasters get an ever-growing set of relevant, one way backlinks to their websites.

So how much effort does NeuroLinker require? Not much. When a website owner joins the system, all he must do is login to his NeuroLinker account on the web and enter some information about each of his websites. This information includes a brief description, up to 20 different sets of anchor text, and a title and header for the outgoing links page. Then he must create a link on his homepage to his new outgoing links page (not necessary if the outgoing links page already exists and already has a link from the homepage). Finally he must copy some simple code that the NeuroLinker system provides into the newly created link page. Once this is finished, the webmaster submits the website to NeuroLinker (just by pressing a Submit" button). As long as the website meets NeuroLinker's quality standards (must be a reasonable quality site, no gambling or hate or porn or spam, etc.) then NeuroLinker will approve the site (usually within a day or two). Once the site is approved, the links start building automatically with no additional effort required of the webmaster. That's right - once you submit your website and get it approved, you'll see your backlinks start to grow automatically with no additional effort.

This is a true "fire-and-forget" solution to the backlink problem. It saves you a ton of time and money by making your biggest headache as a webmaster go away. Using NeuroLinker allows you to focus your energies on building your business and doing what you love rather than on the tedious task of building backlinks. The decision to use NeuroLinker is about as close to a "no brainer" as you'll find in running an online business.

Check out the Neurolinker website to start getting Relevant Backlinks and to solve your website marketing problems.