What Are Back Links and How Do I Get Them?

Back links may sound like a foreign term to those just starting a home based business. If you are not familiar with back links, I highly recommend you learn what they are all about and make them a daily priority. Let me explain what exactly back links are, how you can get them, and why they are so important.

A back link is a one way link or url that is on someone else's website or blog. They call it a back link because it is pointing back to a different website. If I were to leave a comment on someone else's blog, I would leave my website url on that blog so people can find my website. That url that I left behind would be considered and counted as one back link.

Now that you know what a back link is, let me explain why they are so important to your home based business.

We are all familiar with the major search engines on the internet, i.e. Google, MSN, Yahoo, and the like. Those search engines rank websites for keywords (search terms) based on the authority of the websites. The websites with the most back links are considered more authoritative and will ultimately rank higher in the search engines for their selected keywords.

This ensures that the people who work hardest at getting the back links will get ranked higher and receive the most traffic. That's why it is so important to start getting those back links adding up so your home based business can receive the high quality free traffic the search engines bring.

There are many ways to get back links, and you should do everything within your power to use all methods as much as you can. Here's a few ideas to get you going.

You can write articles and submit them to article directories. The directories allow you to leave a back link in the article resource box. Not only will you get traffic and build rapport with the articles, but it's also a great way to build back links.

Find blogs with likewise themes and leave comments on their blogs. With your comment you can leave a back link. The more you do this, the more the back links add up.

Search for website directories and submit your website to be posted on their directories. There are tens of thousands of online directories you can submit to, many of which are free. Some of them will ask you to give a reciprocal link, but one way links are the best way to go.

Join a forum and set up your signature in the forum. The signature is a place where you can put your back link and you will get one back link for every post you make.

So now you have all the information you need about what back links are, how they are important, and how you can get them. Use all these methods and come up with your own. Just start getting your back links out there and in mass numbers. It's a very tedious process to do but will ensure the long term success of your home based business.

Set a daily quota to hit and work to hit that number every day. Getting back links every day will really set your business up to succeed and should be considered an absolute priority.


Copyright (c) 2008 Matt Helphrey

Why to do Link Building?

Search engine optimization comprises of On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization. As of now Off Page optimization has higher significance than On Page optimization for search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN.

What is Off Page Optimization?

• Improving Link Popularity
• Using keyword rich anchor text
• Improving Google PR

what is Link Popularity & why is it required?

Link Popularity is defined as the number of incoming links your site domain has in each search engine. This is like the number of positive votes your site domain has on the internet. So, higher the number should be your primary goal. But you should make a note here that having a higher number of incoming links is not just enough. The quality of the incoming links matters a lot.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN would rank your website higher or lower in the search engine results depending on your link popularity.

How to check your Link Popularity?

In the search bar of any of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN type the following and press enter:

link:http://www.yoursitedomain.com (Please replace “yoursitedomain” with your website’s URL)

This would give you an idea as how many websites on the internet linking to your website.
What is link building & what are the different types?

Link building is the off page optimization strategy to improve your link popularity. There are basically two types of link building.

• Reciprocal Link Building
Reciprocal linking means there is one incoming and one outgoing link, i.e. there is link exchange between your site and the linking site. You first link to the other website and request the webmaster if they would like to link back.

• Non reciprocal Linking

Non reciprocal linking is to have only the incoming link without your site linking back. This would carry more value than the reciprocal link. But, this does not mean that reciprocal linking is not worth to do. It has it’s importance. Non reciprocal linking is better but a little tougher to achieve.

How to do reciprocal link building?

You need to find the websites which has similar theme as yours but not direct competition and request a link exchange. Once you find the right websites then you add a link to these websites on your links page and send an individual email to each one of these website owners.

Now, you should take care of the anchor text, also known as linking text. This is the text which is displayed on the other website linking to your website. This is how the HTML tag looks like:

Example:anchor text

The anchor text should be the best keyword describing your website and it has high value attached to it.

These are the three basic things you would need before you request a link exchange with the link partner websites.

Link Cloaking And Link Tracking - Are They The Same?

You often hear talk of "link cloaking" in the internet marketing business, and most times it's also somehow linked to something called link tracking, or ad tracking -- Which one should you care about in your online business?

To answer that, we need to go into a little bit of detail about how cloaking is handled in the background -- and don't fret, this is going to stay at a "high level" -- I'll resist the tempation to get all "techy" with you!

When you give someone a cloaked link to click on, it’s going to lead back to YOUR web site -- it doesn’t go straight to the site of the product you’re promoting. It leads to your site, it’s automatically looked up in a list, and the person who clicked is redirected to the product site using your affiliate link.

Since the click takes the person to YOUR site first, the cloaking software takes the opportunity to save some information, such as the date and time of the click, where the user came from, end even the IP address of the user.

By saving that information in a file you can look at, it’s easy to see what links are being clicked on.

So the process of cloaking a link, also means the link can be tracked -- as long as you’re using software that takes that into account. There are some methods of cloaking a link that don’t track the clicks, and I recommend you stay away from those. Since cloaking and tracking can easily be accomplished at the same time, it makes sense to use one tool that does them both.

So, is there any difference between a link that's redirected and a link that's cloaked?

They’re basically the same thing -- a cloaked link will redirect the person who clicked it to the site of your choice. They see, and click on, a link that looks very normal, but it can be a long gnarly-looking link on the back-end that they’re redirected to.

And that brings up another reason to use a redirect, or a cloaked link. Sometimes, even if you’re not using an affiliate link, you end up with a link that’s just too long for emails without wrapping, or that just looks ugly. In those cases a cloaked link will get the person to the correct page or site, but you’ll use a nice compact link to do the job.

Most people have seen links using the TinyURL web site -- those are cloaked links that redirect the user to a different web site. While the links are nice and short -- and disguise the destination of the link -- the downside to using a service like that is that you don't control the redirect URL -- once you've sent out the link, you have to live with it.

Using a self-hosted solution for handling your cloaking/redirecting and tracking is usually a much better option for your online marketing business.

Getting More Links To Your Website

The more links you have to your site (AKA backlinks), the higher listing you have with search engines. It also brings you more traffic. You can also exchange links with another site. This in known as a 2 way link. A one way link is better though. You can submit your link to directories to get one way links. People can go to these thousands of directories and add their link to it.

Each of these websites has their own rules. Many of them offer 3 choices. You send them your information (add link or submit link) and they look it over and decide whether to accept it. One choice is a free submission. Some sites may say that with this choice it may take up to 6 months before they review your site. These groups want you to create links back to them so they can becoe bigger. When you do this then you are submitting a reciprocal link. This is a higher priority and it gets reviewed sooner than the other links and has other perks.

Then there is the paid for link called possibly a featured link. This type of link gets looked at the soonest and you get other perks like being able to submit other pages of your website in addition to the main page. Submitting these links to so many sites can take a lot of work. Some sites offer to do it for you if you pay them. So that is something you can try.

A way of getting two way links is by exchanging links. You can just look for sites that you like and ask them if the want to exchange links. there are also link exchange places that help you to do this. They have many members who are looking to do this and they can request you or you can request them through the website to exchange links. I have been using one of these for 2 years.

With the group I use, if a site requests a link from you, they have to put up the link first. Then they check it and notify you that it was done and for you to do the same. Many of these sites will put your link on a page that is not connected to their website so no one will ever see it. The exchange group can check that the link is on the page but the page might not be connected to the website which means it does you no good. So you have to check this. There are many unscrupulous people on the internet.

When it comes to links to your website there is a difference of how much it helps you. The Google page rank is a way to measure how much a link from that site helps you. The larger this number is, the better it is. The numbers are from 0 to 10. Some experts tell you not to exchange links with a site that has a PR of 0. If it is a bad site, it could hurt you to have a link to it. Some say not to exchange links with a site that has a PR lower than yours.

Acquiring Quality In Bound Links To Your Website

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.

Is Link Popularity Really Worth The Trouble?

There is no question that Google page rank and link popularity have been the two key focuses of search engine optimization. People often are confused as to what link popularity really is and how it truly does benefit your search engine optimization. The better your site is the more people are going to link back to your site giving you an increase in popularity and a higher page rank.

So what exactly is this whole link popularity thing? It is exactly as it sounds; as people from other sites begin linking to your site search engines see that it has some popularity. With an increase of people linking to your site, search engines see it as people viewing good websites and they boost your page rank. Obviously, we all try and link with sites that are equal to or better than our own to help our page rank.

If you're looking to increase popularity on your site, there really are two main ways to do so. First off you want to link with other sites that focus on the same keywords as yourself. This helps keyword optimization of your site and allows you to stay within the same theme for your website. Secondly, find links that are relevant to your category and subject. Often times there is no good linking to a swimming website if you have a sewing website.

Now, people often times get confused between page rank and link popularity. The difference ultimately leads to whether or not you are going to exchange links with that sewing website or not. Google page rank focuses on the quantity and popularity of links that you exchange with, not caring whether it is relevant to your site or not. Link popularity on the other hand keeps in mind quantity and popularity, but also adds a focus on the quality of links you are getting. So it is important that you know the difference when trying to increase your popularity.

How important link popularity really is just depends on the site. If you are trying to get to the top of the search engines with certain keywords, it is probably wise to target links that are relevant to your website. However, it seems that Google has more importance and power on incoming links than other search engines. With that said, as of today you probably would be more beneficial focusing on quantity as opposed to quality if you want to increase popularity of your site.

Try not to worry too much about link popularity because it is a tiny portion of most search engines' ranking algorithms. It is important to keep it in mind and try to increase your popularity, but nothing to lose sleep over. In reality, if you want to get the most links back just have the best site with the best content and most focused niche and you won't have a problem getting links.

Copyright © Melody Heddings

Did you give permission for THAT link?

Looking over several webmaster services, I found a few services that actually use others to rank well with search rankings. Now some of these are obvious and some of these are hidden. This article should give you something to keep in mind when using online services.

Now most web design companies (the good ones anyway) know something about search engines. So in there terms and conditions, they state that the link to there own site, with is normally a text link at the bottom of the home page.

In some cases, all the pages have a link that must stay on the design. Now that's ok as long as you are aware of this. It's a form of business branding that transmits in to ranking due to the power of external links. I suppose if could be compared to a car driving around with a name badge. Really they are using your site for advertising.

What about free services? Most of them create a link to the programmers site, these include link exchange software programs and contact form programs . The most famous would be the free blog software, wordpress. Which is reasonable after all you are getting a free program that works for you. However what if it links back and you are NOT aware of it? Are you being used without your knowledge?

I happen to find a program that does this and at the same time creates links that are keyword specific. I have to admit the service program is good however I wasn't aware of the link because it's invisible to the web visitor but visible to Google.

I can show you how it works by the following steps:

1. Install the Google toolbar if you don't already have it

2. Go to DigitalAwol.com

3. Click the arrow to the right of the page rank button to show the drop down menu

4. Click on "Cached snapshot of page" which is the view of the Google has on a certain date

5. Click on "cached text" only

6. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page

7. Look over the left side in the blue and you will see the Keyword text link

If you have done the process above, you will see the company involved. If you search, you will see they are in the top 5 for it in Google.

I am guessing there a lot of other sites that have had the same applied and don't even realise it. The site mentioned has over 400 Number one rankings for different keywords, which mainly due the process above. How could you do something similar to this and get the rankings you want? That's all for now.