Otherwise known as inbound links, or simply IBLs, backlinks are an important ingredient for high search engine rankings. A blog, an article, a press release, etc can only get to the top search engine results page if it has a lot of backlinks. This is because backlinks show the search engines that a site gets a lot of traffic and with more traffic, it means higher rankings. The question in many people’s mind is how to go about getting these backlinks.
First off, if your budget permits, you can submit your site to directory submission services. This is arguably one of the oldest ways to get backlinks and for certain agreed upon amount, the service providers will choose the relevant directories to submit your website to for a given amount of backlinks. Alternatively, you can decide to do the submission personally on such directories as the famous Yahoo directory.
As for the non-paid ways to get backlinks, here is how you can go about it.
- One of the time tested ways to do this is to write quality content articles and submit on article directories. The directories are many and each directory you submit to gives you a link. Further, when the article is published by other people, you get more backlinks to your site. With useful and informative good quality content, readers will be encouraged to link to your articles. Ensure the articles have compelling titles to grab the attention of readers.
- Submit your pages to popular web directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo Directory, and even though it can take anything from a few weeks to some months to get listed on the search engines, the wait will be worthwhile.
- Using popular bookmarking sites like Technorati.com, stumbleupon.com, reddit.com, delicious.com. bookmark all your web pages. You can even use socialmarker.com, a free online tool that makes the work of bookmarking easier.
- Join and take part in forums by submitting blogs and posting informative and relevant comments. Ensure the forums are relevant to your website to get more targeted traffic.
- Still on point, make a positive and relevant contribution by commenting in blogs related to your specific niche and ensure you link the comment to your article or to the related content on your site.
- Make use of the Free Traffic System services, a tool that publishes and tracks down all articles that you submit to relevant blogs and which link back to your site. This also boosts the page rank and in turn gives you high rankings.
- Finally, keep in mind that according to the search engines, not all backlinks are created the same. Therefore, you have to ensure you get top quality backlinks as search engines tend to devalue links from low ranking sites and directories.
Keep in mind also that the search engines are very smart and can get very suspicious when suddenly you have very many backlinks. To them, this could be spamming which means your rankings will be lowered.
Therefore, if you have to submit to directories, do it in stages and not submit all at once in all the directories available so that the search engines can see it as a natural way of building backlinks.
The best way, or probably the only way, to enhance traffic to your website is through search engine optimization or SEO. If you optimize your website by using different SEO strategies, you will be able to gain organic back links and, most importantly, more people will come visit your site.
Before you begin optimizing your website, you must expect that it will eat a lot of your time, but if you do it right, this can deliver a long-term benefit. SEO is a better option than SEM or the search engine marketing.
Below are ways on how you can improve your traffic to your website through SEO:
- Determine your page rank. In order to determine your current page rank, you can use tools like Google toolbar and Alexa. You can use these two tools to keep track of the progress of your site.
- Choose the right keywords. Keywords are usually the words that Internet users type into search engines when looking for specific information and they play a big role in increasing traffic to your site. If you employ the right keywords to your contents, your website will most likely be viewed by more people. Your chosen keywords must be seen in your titles, sub-titles, body, tags, anchor texts, URLs and image description.
- Include a site map. Site map refers to an outline of all your web pages. This is basically for the purpose of easier navigation.
- Do not overdesign your website. Flashy texts or graphics may be appealing if they are applied to artistic works, but not to websites. Overdesigning your site might just affect your position in search engines as they might not be able to correctly interpret the keywords that are contained in your titles, contents, tags, etc.
- Place keywords on your URLs. If you want your website to be easily remembered by web users, make sure that your URLs contain your keywords.
- Build external links. External links are built if other website owners post your link on their websites. In order for them to link you, you must see to it that your contents are of high quality and that your website is worth linking.
- Put a description on the pictures that you’ve included on your website. Search engines do not include pictures when ranking websites, but they definitely take a peek on the descriptions of the pictures. That is why you should place your keywords on your image descriptions.
According to search engine optimization (or SEO) experts, the best way to get a good spot in search engines like Google and Yahoo is to have one-way back links, but they do not exactly say how you can obtain them and where to get them. Here are some ways on how to get one-way back links and improve your rank in search engines:
1. Comment on blogs. Look for blogs that are somewhat related to your website’s niche, read their contents, and leave a comment. Make sure that you leave interesting comments so you can catch the attention of blog owners. If ever they’ll find your comments interesting and valuable, they will certainly post your link on their blogs. But the most important thing of all, do not forget to include your link when commenting on blogs.
2. Solicit back links from your customers and suppliers. You may ask a little favor from your customers and also from your suppliers if they could place your link on their websites. You might need to give them something in exchange for the back link, not a payment, but just some kind of a token of gratitude. You can, for instance, give your customers freebies or discounts, and for your suppliers, you can make a good comment or testimony regarding the products or services that they’re offering.
3. Submit your link to online link directories. Most link directories that you find online are useless, and it seems that only a few people use them to find websites, but it really doesn’t matter because all you need are links. This time, you will not have to worry about the value of the site linking to you. There are websites that may ask for link exchanges or sometimes money before you get linked, and this are the kind of sites that you should avoid as they won’t give you any due advantage.
4. Submit your contents on article directories. Article submission is one of the best ways to gain one-way back links. The initial step that you have to do is to come up with several good quality and helpful articles about your website’s niche and then submit them to article directories, such as GoArticles and EzineArticles. If readers who visit the article directories find your articles valuable to their site, they might repost your article or post your link to their respective websites. Search engines treat such back links to be of low quality, unlike links that come from your suppliers and customers.
Page ranks are basically determined by the external links that lead to a particular web page. This is the reason why most webmasters are so eager to get back links to see their rank improve in the page rank of Google. Also, because of this link building is also becoming a popular online job. Although links are really very important to improve one’s page rank, it seems that people are forgetting the other SEO factors or techniques, and one of them is the creation of quality contents.
Creating quality contents is the best SEO technique that can effectively put your website into a high position. Having countless external links is useless if your web pages do not contain well-written articles. It can be safely said that you just allocate your time creating excellent contents rather than building links to your site.
However, I am not saying that link building is not an effective SEO technique. External links can also have a great contribution to the success of your website. There actually are two reasons why it is also essential to SEO. First, it can help improve your rank in search engines and second, it can boost the traffic to your site.
When building external links, you have to see it that they are quality links. You should know what types of websites you should focus on. Quality links can be obtained from reputable websites. If you are able to get links from highly-regarded sites, even though they are just a few, you will definitely be ranked high in search engines.
Search engines have no standard criteria as to how websites should be ranked as they change their algorithm every now and then. This means that they do not rank websites just by looking at their external links alone. They also base it on the relevance of the sites that link to them and, of course, on their contents. Another effective SEO technique is the use of anchor text.
If you want your website to get a high rank in search engines, see to it that its contents are unique and relevant. It is also important that you update your contents regularly and build quality links that can be useful in the long run.
So by now, you should already know that external links are not the best way to achieve a high rank in search engines, but the creation of quality contents is.
Website development and designing takes a lot of time, effort, and money, therefore can be a total waste of resources if no one visits it. However, it will not be a waste of time and money if you optimized your website for the search engines by wise choice of keywords. With the right use of the right keywords and key phrases, be guaranteed that your website will rank among the top in the search engine results and thus drive the much needed traffic towards your site.
First and foremost therefore, you should be in a position to clearly identify your target audience to be able to know the most likely key phrases and keywords that they are likely to use when searching for your website online. Your first course of action therefore should be to collect as many keywords and key phrases as possible – words that are as closely related to your service or products as possible and which are of course relevant.
After that, you should analyze the words based on their competitiveness, popularity, and limitations, all which are determined by advanced search methods. As per this analysis and with your target audience in mind, you can then narrow down the list by choosing the most relevant keywords and then of course incorporate the keywords in your site by using them on the HTML code, all the tags as well as on the content.
The criteria of choosing keywords related to the services and products you are marketing online can take different turns but the greatest advantage of online marketing is the ability to target a specific niche audience, hence your keyword research should target this. The length of the keywords you choose is another criterion, where people place more value on lengthy keywords than single word keywords.
Adding words like ‘affordable’ ‘discount’ and ‘cheap’ before or after your keyword phrases will also work very effectively, especially at such economic tumultuous times. Be advised that people have a tendency of misspelling some words and as such, you should also include some of the most common misspellings in your site content. Note however that you should use the common misspellings in a way that it will not appear to your visitors as a grammatical error.
There are online keyword research tools like Market Samurai, WordTracker, and Google Insights for Search which can greatly help you in collecting keywords. Further, the tools can help you analyze the competition, search volumes, latest trends, and a lot more on your selected keywords. The simplest way however to check how efficient a keyword is should be to search for the keyword on any of the search engines and look at the results that will be generated.
You will discover that if a keyword gives you more results, it will be very hard to get sufficient traffic from that keyword. Common keywords are way too competitive while less popular keywords, although they will give you the top search engine results that you want, they will drive less traffic to your site as they are rarely used by your target audience. This is where keyword research comes into play to be able to help you find a balance between the two in order to identify keywords and key phrases that will give you a substantial amount of traffic with little or no competition.
Boiled down, keyword research should be a continuous process and not a one-off thing when starting out your online marketing campaign.
