The Importance of Backlinks

In the not too distant past it was a relatively easy procedure to get high rankings in the search engines. All you had to do was load your pages and meta tags with the same keyword. Many spammers took advantage of this and would stuff a page with keywords. Very often this was to re-direct visitors to other sites.

As could be expected, the search engines weren’t too happy when searchers looking for a bus timetable, for example, ended up at a porn site. They started to penalize sites that repeated keywords too often or used “hidden” keywords which used a font color that was the same as the background.

Nevertheless, so-called “on-page factors” such as the location of keywords and their density on the page remained a major search engine optimization (SEO) technique for many years. However, this started to change when Google introduced a new system to help gauge the quality of sites. This system was called Google PageRank, or more simply PR.

Page rank was originally based on the number of links to a site so all you has to do was gain thousands of links back to your site to get a higher PR. Again, spamming became commonplace with webmasters gaining lots of low quality links from places such as free-for-all link sites.

To combat this, Google changed the weighting of low quality sites and it became much more important to obtain links from genuinely worthwhile sites. Another important change to their algorithm involved the importance of anchor text. Anchor text is the text that other sites use to link to your site. Finally, more weighting was usually given to thematically-related sites. For example, if you have a site about dog collars it is better to get backlinks from other sites related to dogs (rather than say ‘shoes’).

How can you get these illusive high quality, thematically related backlinks to help increase your own search engine rankings? There are many techniques to do this. These include –

Write articles and submit them to quality article directory sites.

Post comments on blogs (but only those that don’t use the “nofollow” tag.

Participate in high PR forums and have a link back to your signature.

Submit a press release about your site.

Exchange links with other high quality sites (This may be difficult to achieve on it’s own, but you can provide an incentive such as offering to write exclusive articles for their site in exchange).

While Google isn’t the only search engine, it does provide the lion’s share of traffic. In addition, the other search engines are giving greater weighting to "off-page" factors such as backlinks as well. With a bit of effort you can get these quality links and see your own share of traffic increase as a result.

These are just a few things you can do to get backlinks. Don't limit yourself to just these ideas. The options are endless!