Backlinks to your website are one of the major guages that Google, Yahoo and MSN use to determine how important your website is to web searchers. It’s the ultimate form of democracy.

The search engines see backlinks (links from another website to yours) as a vote of confidence. It basically says that the information on your website is so valuable that someone else is willing to send their visitors to you for information without asking for a link back.

This is sometimes a point of confusion for business owners. They often get offers from linking strategy firms offering to conduct a backlink campaign. Unfortunately, this never works.

The way these firms operate is to either contact other websites and buy links back to your website or they place a link to your website on a “link farm”. Either of these strategies the search engines are quite familiar with and don’t like. And they will slam you in the rankings for it.

The link has to come from a website with similar content to yours or applicable content. And the link has to come from a website that is higher in the rankings than yours. And reciprocal links are almost useless. To be considered a “vote of confidence” the link has to be one way.

By the way, if a firm contacts you and wants to pay you to put text links on your website, politely decline. The links will hurt your standings with Google. And the reason these people are contacting you is because you are higher in Google than their client.

So how do you get these magic backlinks? The only way I know of that will truly boost you in the website rankings on the search engines is to put valuable content on your website that other websites want to link to.

A lot of times, when I’m writing a new article or blog post for my website to add new content, I’ll search the web for other content that either compliments my content, gives a more in-depth approach, or gives a nice definition for a term in my article. Every one of those articles I link to is a backlink for that other website. And that’s what the search engines are looking for for them. And Google likes it when you link to even more related content from your articles. So even though those are outgoing links, they impress Google.

Originally posted 2008-03-25 14:37:05. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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