The Basics Of Back Linking

I have been asked recently to explain back linking and how and why this is important to rank web pages.  There is 2 types of Search Engine Optimization, on page and off page. On page is the actual set up of your website so the search engines can find your site and rank it accordingly for the chosen topic or keyword.  I have written a previous post which provides more details on the on page requirements here.

Whilst on page optimisation is still important for the search engines to find and rank our web sites correctly, this now amounts to less than 10% of the overall factors Google take in to account when deciding on our ranking positions.  This being the case, I would suggest not spending too much time trying to get every factor correct with the initial on page set up of your site and providing you install the plug ins recommended in my previous post you will be 90% there, a far more important issue is getting back links to your site and therefore increasing your traffic flow.

What is a back link?

A back link is like a vote of confidence to your web site, in general the more you have the higher you will rank,  the big question I get asked on a frequent basis is how do I actually get these back links to point back to my site? I remember when I was first starting out, it seems like another language and it can appear to be  the most difficult task in the world to master so here are a couple of strategies to follow to build your first back links.

The Basics

Create quality content

We all see the extravagant claims of some marketers that they can get  millions of visitors over night with a couple of clicks of a
mouse, Traffic in 99% of the time results from links in quality content being posted around the web,  in  articles directories, blog posts, forum posts, guest blog posts etc.  The more quality content you can syndicate on the web the more traffic you can expect to receive because that content will have back links pointing back to your site which in turn increases your search engine position. As an added bonus, you will also get direct traffic from the content that gets posted with visitors clicking through  to your website directly from one of your posts or articles.

Anchor Text Links

In order to get the maximum benefit from the link it is far more beneficial to place the actual keyword you are trying to rank for in the link text.  Lets assume you have a new website, this is an example of  how you would add your anchor text link for the key word “list building systems”

David Henry is a list building expert, if you want to discover how you can add hundred’s of new subscribers each day using only free tools please visit list building systems

Normally most platforms have an automatic link maker which is normally a locked chain icon in the admin panel, if you don’t see this or need to add a link manually this is the format it needs to be for the majority of websites,

<a href=”http://www.listbuildingsystems.info”>list building systems<a>

Setting Up Your First Link

Write an article with your chosen keyword in the title and post to your blog, ideally the article needs to be 600 words + and of top quality, try to use the keyword phrase in the article title and 4 or 5 times in the actual post itself and bold it throughout the post. The old school ways of keyword stuffing simply doesn’t work anymore and the key here  is to provide natural quality content that is 100% unique.

If you have set up your word press blog as I recommend you will have added the list of websites that ping your content automatically after every post you publish which syndicates it across the web very quickly.  Post the URL of the article post in full (don’t shorten it) on Twitter, if you don’t have a Twitter account set one up, its free and takes 2 Min’s, google is constantly trawling Twitter looking for the latest news so your article Will get picked up very quickly.  Twitter is one of the quickest ways to get content indexed providing you submit the full URL and don’t use a shorting service.

Social bookmarking

Set up social bookmarking sites, visit onlywire and set up a free account.  You can post 1 piece of content and it is
automatically syndicated across the whole network, the last time I checked they had 41 sites you can submit to and you are allowed to submit a total of 300 posts per month on a free account.

It will take you a couple of hours to complete the applications for each individual bookmarking site, if you don’t have the time visit www.fiverr.com and you can get all 41 sites set up and log in details emailed to you for 5$, well worth it in my opinion.

If you submit to 30 sites it is classed as 30 posts so you could submit 10 times per month on that sort of basis.  If you need more they do offer a paid service starting at $10 per month for 1000 posts.  Write a snippet of the article you have just posted to your blog and add an anchor text link to the body of the snippet, it should be 75 to 100 words long to introduce the article to the readers  and then add the URL of the actual post in the submitter, this gives you 2  back links  from each bookmarking site you submit to.  Bookmarking is an extremely important part of ranking and should always be the first thing you do with every now post or article you write.

Web 2.0 Properties

You need to set up “mini sites”  or web 2.0 sites as they are known.  It is very important to submit relevant good quality unique  content at all times to these type of sites. These sites have strick submission polices which filter out poor duplicated conten Google is aware of this so places a much higher value on published content from this type of site.  If you choose to “spin” the content you have posted on your original blog please ensure you read it back and make sure it is readable and unique or it will not pass the filters.

Set Up accounts at the following sites

Squidoo

Hubpages

Word Press

Blogger

Tumblr

Creating a link wheel

Post your article to the website ensuring you add your anchor text links.  Now here we create our first mini link wheel which passes page rank and “link juice” to the other web sites in the chain.  You can normally add 2 links per article, point the first link to the next web 2.0 site on your list and point the other link to your home page of your blog.  Repeat the process of adding a post to the next website, and this time link it to the next website on your list and to your home page, continue this format until you come to the last website in your list, this time you should point both links to your own site and not close the wheel be linking to the first site. This is a powerful way to provide back links to your back links which in turn passes more weight to your main website.

Forum profiles and posts

Search in Google for a list of forums in your niche, register and join each one and complete your profile, this normally allows you to add your website URL which is a back link, after you have contributed a min no of posts you can normally add a signature link to your posts which again is a back link in your anchor text describing your website or service.  Make sure you spend time on these important forums in your niche,  contribute to the threads and try to post interesting information that will genuinely help people out, you will be amazed at the number of clicks you will receive from fellow members who read your comment and then decide to find a bit more about you.  Here is an example of my signature link for my list building course.

David Henry is a list building expert, if you want to discover how you can add hundred’s of new subscribers each day using only free tools please visit list building systems

Ezine directories

Submit your unique articles to the following ezine article directories, these are high PR sites and get spidered by the search engines who are constantly looking for the latest articles, news and views.  This can lead to diverse collection of back links and can be a good source of direct traffic with other web masters constantly picking up other authors articles to use as additional content on their websites.  A good feature here is that they have to publish the author resource box complete with  your links so if someone finds the article of interest there is every chance you will get that visitor clicking through to your site.

ezinearticles

articlealley

goarticles

Not all links are the same!

This is very important to understand and especially if you choose to buy some link building services.  Beware of the bold claims to provide 30,000 profile links for $25 etc, this type of link is really worthless and tend to be auto-approve blogs or forums where anything is allowed.

When looking at back linking always try to bear in mind the importance of the link in relation to the page rank of the URL it is coming from.  Google award a page rank to each and every web site, this is what they think of the content and the quality of the links of the particular web site,  for instance, Wikipedia has a page rank of  6  because in Google’s eyes they are providing great quality content and have some of the most powerful websites in the world all linking to them, Twitter has a page rank of 8 because Google view the constant updating of live information extreamy important to its visitors.

Google view high page rank sites as authority sites and give more weight to a link from an authority site than from some
nondescript forum with a PageRank of 0.   This is the reason you need to take care in posting articles and general content to the web 2.0 sites and ezine directories and you should always be on the look out for opportunities to post your links to high PR sites.  I will be covering how to find high PR sites in the next post covering more advanced  techniques.

Conclusion

Back linking can sometimes be viewed as a dark art, you never really know how successful your efforts have been and which links are making the difference in your rankings unless you invest in software that provides tracking stats, you can get basic information from yahoo site explorer and I like to use majestic SEO which provides a more detailed summary. it is very important to constantly be adding links on a daily basis from as many diverse places as possible, link building has to appear natural to the search engines, it is a myth that you can build links too fast which will result in your site getting “sand boxed”, the key to link building is link velocity, providing you are building links at the same sort of rate on a daily basis, in my experience Google will not penalise you, if on the other hand you build links that don’t look natural and are not being added evenly you will get flagged as a possible spammer.

This is a basic introduction to link building and is the entry level strategy you should adopt if you are building your first site or have not really done any conscious link building.  I will be adding more advanced posts in the coming weeks covering creating hubs, building link pyramids and the importance of using video in your back link efforts.

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