What is Backlinking?
Backlinking is the process whereby website owners refer to their website using their website URL on other sites with the ultimate goal being more traffic to their respective websites. How this is accomplished is simply by leaving your website link using as many means as possible using numerous other sites in the form of blog comments, blogs, classified ads, social bookmarking sites and link directories. These links are left on other sites which all link back to your site. Think of it as a vote for your site which gets spidered by Google and other major search engines with the goal of having the site where your backlink appears indexed and as a consequence your link indexed.
Why Is Backlinking important to your website?
This is a very popular subject and an extremely important part of advertising and ranking your website with the major search engines. Links referring back to your website are known as “inbound links” and links on your site pointing to other websites is called “outbound links” The simplest way to explain what links are is to consider them like votes for your site. Google uses links as means of quantifying the importance of your website and is used to measure Googles page rank and as a consequence the SERP or search engine results page when someone is searching using Google’s search engine
Are all Backlinks created equal?
No definitely not. Where your website’s backlinks are located has extreme importance. Let me explain. When an inbound link exists on another website four things give your link weight with Google.
- What page rank does the site have where your link resides
- Relevancy. Is your link on a site that is relevant to your business. i.e. If you were a stamp collector and your link was on a site that sold cars there would be no relevancy resulting in little to no weight.
- How many links are on the same page as yours? The more links the less weight your site will have with Google indexing
- Exactly where does your link reside? You will note some sites carry more authority than others. YouTube is extremely important and carries a lot of weight with Google. You will notice often when you do a search on Google the top results are generally YouTube videos.
In the first point, you need to use a tool to evaluate the Google Page Rank or PR ranking of the site where your link resides. You can use a site like Google Page Rank Checker. Incidentally, the site hosting this tool has a Google Page ranking of 7 out of 10. The closer to 10 the better it is for your ranking with Google. Better ranking translates to improved SERP ( Search Engine Results Page ). Higher the number the more popular your site is with Google. As an example, Facebook has a PR9 out of a possible 10. Extremely popular. Image the many thousands of links ( votes) all over the internet.
Where are some of the places you can expect to have backlinks or links back to your website?
There are many places backlinks are used. Below is a shortlist,
* Blog articles
* Blog Comments
* Link Directories
* Article Submission Sites ( Ezine.com)
* Social bookmarking sites such as Facebook, Hubpages, Twitter and Squidoo and Youtube ( not listed in order of importance)
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