Backlinks & Search Engine Marketing

If you want your website to rank well in the search engines for your particular keywords or phrases, you must do more than just optimizing the pages on your website. In addition to using search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, you also need to work on getting quality backlinks to your website.

A backlink is a link to your website. You want to get other websites or blogs to link to your site. To rank well in the search engines, the sites and blogs linking back to you must be high quality. In essence, your site will do much better if you have even just a few high-quality backlinks instead of simply doing SEO work on it.

Search engines (e.g., Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) treat backlinks as "votes." They count a backlink to your website as one vote and this factors in to how they rank your website for your particular keywords or phrases. If other websites or blogs are linking to your website, search engines look at your site as a valuable site that has good content. Search engines consider your site important if there are many people linking to it.

However, more important than how many sites are linking to your website is the anchor text. The anchor text refers to the visible text that is clickable. For example:

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com">This is the Anchor Text</a>

The example above is the HTML code for your website. A website owner who links to your website would use this format of linking to your site. The part between the HTML code ("This is the Anchor Text") is the part that website visitors see when they visit the website.

Website visitors aren't the only ones who can read or see the anchor text. Search engines see anchor texts too and they use anchor texts to determine exactly what your website is all about. This is the reason you want sites or blogs linking to your site to use this type of linking because they can link to your website using your main keywords as the anchor text.

What do you need to do to get backlinks to your site? Here are some tips:

* One of the best way you can get other site or blog owners to link to your site is to offer them high-quality content that isn't found anywhere on the Internet. Strive to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Be unique and controversial that people will want to link back to your site.

* Make it easy and quick for others to link back to your site. You can do this by creating a "Link to Us" section on your site and putting in HTML snippets that they can use and paste on their web pages right. Make it a no-brainer for others.

* You can also create original articles and submit those article to free article directories. Other website owners looking for new content can pick up your articles from article directories. They are allowed to publish your articles on their sites at no cost if they publish the articles in their entirety, with your resource box intact. and any URLs clickable. One article submitted to article directories has the potential to generate a few dozens of backlinks to your site.

* You can also find sites related to your target market or niche and contact their owners to see if they would be interested in publishing articles you write specifically for them in exchange for linking back to your site.

* Find free site directories and submit your website to the appropriate categories or niches.

* Research blogs in your niche. Post your comments on some of the post on these blogs and sign it with your name and a link to your website. However, make sure that you post relevant comments. Don't post just for the sake of posting and getting a backlink. Take the time to craft relevant comments even if they are short.

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