I’m going to guess that if you’re reading this post you either run a blog or a website of some sort.  If you are, then getting backlinks to your site should be at the head of your attempts to get good ratings in the search engines.  Better ratings = more visitors = more leads = more money.

So, what exactly is a backlink?  A backlink is a link to your site, from another site, without you linking to their site.  It’s a one way link, and is considered to be more powerful in the eyes of the major search engines than links from one site to the other, or reciprocal links.

Ok, that sounds super… Now why do you want them?  Because a site that has a lot of backlinks to it is seen to be somehow important.  Let’s say, for instance, that you took a poll of all the fan websites of your favorite band.  I’m willing to bet money (and I’ve lived in Vegas) that 80% of those fan websites have a link to the band’s official page. However, the band, in all likelihood isn’t linking back to the fan sites.  The band’s site is seen as being the more relevant one because everyone is pointing back to it.  Hence the power of the backlink.

So, how do you get these mysterious and wonderful backlinks?

Well, there are several ways to do it, and they can either be extremely helpful or extremely harmful to your website. First, let’s talk about good ways to go about building backlinks:

1) Article marketing.  Yes, I know, I go on and on about article marketing all the time because it’s what I’m good at and my preferred method of traffic generation.  Whenever you submit an article to a website, there’s a little box down at the bottom called the resource box.  Inside the resource box, you can include a link back to your site, and bam, instant backlink.  If you are using software to automatically submit your articles, make sure it’s going SLOW and not blasting out all your articles in one giant sneeze.

2) Good backlink services.  There are places online that will help you build backlinks to your site.  I use one called VoltRank that I like because you can do a few special things with it:  a) You can choose how many backlinks you want to your site each day, b) make several different backlinks, each including different link text, to avoid having the identical link back to your site all over the net.  Oh yea, it’s also free.

Now what are bad ways to build backlinks?

1) Bad backlink services.  I won’t name any names, but they are out there.  They take your link, and they blast it out to 5,000 different websites at the same time, and when the search engines look they say “hey, this website suddenly has 5,000 links back to it… And look, they all occurred at the same time!”  Then the search engine takes your website, wipes with it and flushes it down the toilet.

2) Most backlink software.  Again, I won’t name names, and they are trouble for the same reason.  Backlinking should look natural and organic.  Maybe 10-15 a day at most.

Backlinking to your site should be a marathon, not a sprint.  This is part of your effort that you should be thinking about as a long-term strategy to rank well, and not something to get you to the top at the push of a button.  (To quote almost every SEO software package out there….)

So there’s your lesson on building backlinks for your business.  And as always, if you have any questions, just yell!


Recent Posts: