Importance of Backlinks and Link Popularity

Each and every webmaster wants higher rankings on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines his or her sites. To get higher rankings on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines result page your web page should attain optimized web page content and good inbound links.

Tips: A webmaster need both to get top search engine positions

While it is relatively easy to optimize your web page contents, it is more difficult to get good links. Only the right kind of links will help your search engine rankings. The wrong links can have a negative effect on your search engine positions.

Important Factors For Backlinks

Backlinks has become one of the most important factors in the ranking algorithms of modern search engines. The idea behind this concept is that your website must be good if many other websites link to your site.

The followings are very important factors before thinking Link Popularity or back links for your site:

1. It’s very important that the right websites link to you.

2. The websites that link to your site should be related to your site.

3. The links should also be from high quality websites that search engines trust.

4. The links to your website should contain keywords that are related to your site in the anchor text (the text that is used for the link).

5. Think More Quality Back links, more visitors and more sales.

Benefits of Backlinks

Having links from other websites to yours is a critical part of search engine optimization. As well as the obvious bonus of having people follow these links to your site.

Backlinks provide the following benefits:

1. Search engine robots follow links between websites. The more inbound links you have, the more often robots will visit your site.

2. Many search engines count links to your site as “votes” for you. They assume that if many websites link to your site it must be high quality.

Tips: Page Rank is Google’s system of counting links.

How to Check Back Links for Your Site

You can use search engines to find out how many inbound links you have. For example: With Google, Enter the word link: followed by your URL to see a list of all websites, which contain a link to your site.

Tips: Google only returns a selection of inbound links– It doesn’t show all links to your site. Other search engines have the same feature and may provide results that are more comprehensive. Each one works a bit differently– visit any search engine and look for “Advanced Search Options” for more information.

How to Get Natural Back Links For Your Site

The best way to get inbound links is simply to create web pages, which other webmasters will want to link. These are known as natural links– the type of link which is created purely to increase the usefulness of the internet.

Natural links have many advantages:

1. You don’t have to work to acquire them (except creating the content in the first place).

2. They are free and you don’t have to reciprocate the link.

3. The links will be diverse, with different anchor text.

4. The referring pages tend to be similarly themed (this is likely to become more important in the future).

Tips: If you are lucky you will attract enough natural links to give your site a boost.

How to Acquire Back Links For Your Site

You must be very careful before acquiring inbound links. There are many ways to create links to your website some of them are acceptable and some are not. If you use the wrong methods, search engines may detect this and penalize you severely.

Following are Acceptable Methods of Acquiring Back Links:

1. List your website in directories.

2. Contact other websites with similar themes to your and ask for a reciprocal link.

3. Use your URL as part of your signature in discussion forums and newsgroups. Don’t overdo this — keep your signature brief and never spam forums. Make sure you are genuinely contributing to any discussions and not just posting for the sake of displaying your signature.

Following are Unacceptable Methods of Acquiring Back Links

There are no official laws or rules about what is unacceptable linking, but the following methods are widely accepted as being a very bad idea and likely to damage your rankings:

1. Free-for-all link pages and link farms

These are websites which allow you to post your URL freely without being part of any structured or useful directory. Link farms exist to benefit the linked websites rather than any person trying to use the links. Search engines hate link farms, and participating in some of them may cause your site to be banned from certain search engines.

2. Buying links

Some websites sell links from pages with a high PR value. These can be very effective but search engines such as Google have been known to identify and blacklist the websites involved.

Summary

To have any real chance of being noticed by the search engines you need at least a handful of inbound or back links. Without any links at all you will be at a serious disadvantage. The more genuine inbound links you can acquire, the better your search results will be.