Backlinks - Why Are They Important?
In the not too distant past it was a relatively easy procedure to get high rankings in the search engines. All you had to do was load your pages and meta tags with the same keyword. Many spammers took advantage of this and would stuff their pages with keywords. Very often this was to re-direct visitors to other sites.
As could be expected, the search engines weren’t too happy when searchers looking for a local restaurant, for example, ended up at a porn site. They started to penalize sites that repeated keywords too often or hid extra keywords by making the font color the same as the background.
Nevertheless, these methods such as the location of keywords and their density on the page remained a major search engine optimization (SEO) technique for many years. However, this began to change when Google introduced a new system to help gauge the quality of sites. This system was called Google PageRank, or more simply PR.
Page rank was originally based on the number of links to a site so all you has to do was gain thousands of links back to your site to get a higher PR. Again, spamming became common, with webmasters gaining ton’s of low quality links from free-for-all link sites.
To combat this, Google changed the weighting of low quality sites and it became much more important to obtain links from high quality sites. Another important change to their algorithm involved the importance of anchor text. Anchor text is text that other sites use to link to your site by using a keyword or phrase instead of a plain URL. Finally, more weight was given to highly related sites. For example, if you have a site about chocolate recipes it is better to get back-links from other sites related to cooking rather than gardening.
How can you get these illusive high quality, theme related back-links to help increase your own search engine rankings? There are many techniques that you can use to do this.
These include:
- Write articles and submit them to quality article directory sites.
- Post comments on blogs (but only those that don’t use the “nofollow” tag.
- Participate in high PR forums and have a link back to your signature.
- Submit a press release about your site.
- Exchange links with other high quality sites. This may be difficult to achieve on it’s own, but you can provide some type of incentive in exchange.
While Google isn’t the only search engine, it does provide a big share of the traffic. In addition, the other search engines are giving greater weight to “off-page” factors such as back-links as well. With a bit of effort and by doing some of the steps listed above you can begin getting quality links back to your site and see your traffic increase as a result.
Tags: backlink, search engines, SEO, Traffic
