A few words about backlinking.
SEO and SEM pros frequently dispense nuggets of wisdom on the importance of backlinking, so I thought I’d write about this all-important web objective of getting other sites to link back to your site. Why is this so important you may ask? In theory, vastly improved search engine results is the answer.
As most know, Google and other search engines use complex and super-secret algorithms to determine the page rank of a site; incoming links and the quality of incoming links being among them. So don’t just think if you have a thousand sub-standard sites linking to yours, that suddenly you’ll shoot to the top. Thanks to search engine analysis techniques like TrustRank, quality is more important than quantity.
Here’s what I mean. Say you own an agency that specializes in business-to-business advertising, and that’s a keyword you’d like to own. In a perfect world, you’d have hundreds of sites and/or bloggers, posting something to this effect:
“I recommend Shaw & Todd highly. They’re a top business-to-business advertising agency.”
As shown here, the desired keyword is linked back to your site. This would be a home run.
Since we’re talking perfect worlds here, you’d also want these links to be posted on sites that the engines deem content rich information portals. I’d rather have my agency be linked somewhere on the AdAge site than something called “The World’s Worst Website“. I know this seems blatantly obvious, but hey, it needed to be noted.
So how should you go about getting more backlinks to your site? The first thing is to focus on your site itself, and get it as ship-shape content-wise as possible. No sense spending time to get people to link to you if you’ve got a crappy site. Consider creating something for your site that could go viral. Something that people will want to link to (a game or video perhaps) . This is known as “link bait”.
Next, do a Google search on the keywords you desire and visit the sites with the highest rankings. See if you can get any of those sites to link back to you. Then I’d advise visiting a backlink tracking site, such as Backlink Watch. These sites let you view who’s currently linking to you, which is always interesting and sure to spark some ideas. Also plug in the websites with the top search engine rankings in your desired keywords, see who’s linking to them, and try to them to link to your site.
Well, I guess that was more than a few words. That’s all for now on backlinking.
October 28th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
People should read this.