EastBradfordCitizens.com

When you’re first starting out, figuring out how to get backlinks, while not the biggest challenge for new webmasters, can nonetheless be a little confusing. Fortunately, it doesn’t take too long to learn the basics. Now, you’ll figure out some of your own tricks and come up with some great ideas on your own as you go, but the following tips should at least be enough to get the ball rolling.

Be Careful with Your Linkswaps

If you find a website with hundreds of links and they want to swap links with you, forget it. You’re sharing the strength of that site with hundreds of other links, and putting a link on your site in exchange for four or five hits just isn’t worth it. What you want to do is trade links with maybe ten or twenty popular sites who, themselves, are only sharing with maybe ten or twenty other sites.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and a little SEO know-how is a must for a successful website these days. Back in the early to mid nineties, backlinks were used primarily as a means of navigation around the web, in lieu of any good search engines, but today, backlinks are all about SEO, or keywords, to be specific. If you have anchored text, or linked text, in your web content, make sure that you’re using a hot keyword. Someone looking for a wedding photographer, for example, is going to type “Wedding Photographer” into Google, not “Guy to take pictures while me and the old lady get hitched”.

Don’t be Afraid to Ask for a Linkswap

A blog that hasn’t had a new entry in three years isn’t going to do you much good. Do a Google search on related topics and see what comes out on top, and then see if those webmasters wouldn’t mind swapping links with you. Okay, sure, you’re just starting out, so what would Google’s top earners want with you? Well, if you can provide some really high quality content, if you have something that would really compliment the other webmaster’s site, or if maybe you just happened to catch them in a really good mood, you never know. So write a list of some top-viewed sites, in order from most to least viewed, and just go down that list trying every webmaster along the way. One link from a hot site is better than hundreds from a bunch of dead sites that nobody’s even checking anymore.

Spy on the Competition

Check out your competitor’s websites, see who they’re sharing links with, and see if the sites they’re linking with will link with you. This does put you on a website right alongside your competitors, but let’s face it: Competition is the name of the game. The point is to get yourself in the running rather than sitting by wishing you could get some hits.

One Way Links can Help

Not who you’re linked from. Now, of course, it can’t hurt to have as many backlinks to your site out there as possible, but if you have a bunch of links on your site to crummy web pages, it can hurt your site’s trust, in both the viewer’s eyes and in Google’s. Let anyone who wants to link to you, but be careful who you link to. If you link to the authorities on a subject, that improves your link’s trust. So for, say, a site about pets, you could link to the American Kennel Society, but you probably wouldn’t want to link to an AOL member’s page about their poodle, Twinklebelle.

Mike Gates is an online marketer and recommends HostGator for hosting. HostGator is the cheapest web host. Use hostgator coupon to get discount at the time of sign up.

Tags: backlinks, search engine optimization, SEO