Very often clients ask me about “Backlinks” for SEO—that is, links from other sites BACK to yours. The number and quality of links to pages on your site helps determine your Google PageRank, which is Google’s system for calculating your site’s relevance and importance on a scale of 1 to 10. The higher the PageRank, the higher your site displays in Google’s search results. The higher your page displays in Google’s search results, the more traffic you drive to your site.
Understanding what Backlinks can do for Google Page Rank is what inspires many of my clients to look for ways to build quality backlinks. There are quite a few services out there that can supposedly help you with this, but I have yet to come across one that I can recommend.
Fortunately, you can do it on your own. Try these methods:
- Do you have more than one domain? If so, make sure they all link to one another.
- Get listed in DMOZ, also known as the “Open Directory Project,” a human-edited directory of websites. Getting in can be tough and may take a long time, but the effort is worth it.
- Get listed in Yahoo.
- Write and submit articles to article directories.
- Sign up for social bookmarking sites.
- Write and submit press releases.
- Comment on blogs.
- Post in forums and include a link in your signature.
- Link back from your affiliates.
- Offer something of value that people will link back to.
As for backlink relevance, there is a lot of debate on its importance. There is one camp that believes Google takes topic relevance into account, while another camp believes that Google doesn’t include this in their algorithm. Personally, I’m firmly in the former camp. To me, considering relevance makes sense, and if for the moment Google doesn’t do so, there’s no doubt that they will in the future.
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Great points, Jennifer. I completely agree with you about the importance of relevant back links. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to make a difference now, but there’s no telling when the rules will change so it’s best focus on quality back links.
Good article and great information!
Good stuff, Jennifer. Google or not, quite frankly, I don’t see any downside to backlinks.
good job! This was an awesome read!
Hi Jennifer,
In essence, the search engines, led by Google, are doing their best to imitate human behaviour and provide the results that a person would choose, given enough time to sift through them all.
This means that algorithms change and the only thing that makes sense is to do what’s best for humans, because then we are AHEAD of the search engines and they will try to catch up to US, bringing our site(s) up in the ranks all the time.
For this to occur, quality links are essential and your tips are great.
I’m quite happy to try and win your favor on the link building service front, by the way.
Cheers,
Gal
Great article! Good information. You can’t go wrong with backlinks.
Thank you for giving us ideas on getting backlinks. Sounds like there’s some work for me to do!
Now does this count as backlinking if I comment on a post about backlinking?
Or is this some sort of cosmic catch-22 where if you comment on a post about backlinking you do not receive credit for said backlinking?