Ranking well in the search engines for highly competitive phrases takes more than just on-page SEO tactics. It takes backlinks, more backlinks, and still more backlinks.

A backlink is simply when the owner of another website or blog links to your site. As you’ll see,
a few high-quality backlinks can be far more powerful than anything you do on your own website.

To search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, when someone links to your site it’s like they are voting for it. Someone thought your content was valuable enough to link to, so it must be important. The more people linking to your site, the more important it must be.

Even more important than the number of links to your site is the anchor text. Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. For example:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>  This is Anchor Text</a>

The above is the html code for a link to a site called yourdomain.com. On the web page, the anchor text “This is Anchor Text” is what readers actually see.

Search engines see anchor text too, and they use it as a way of determining what your site is all about. This is why you want anchor text of incoming links to include your main keywords whenever possible.

So now that you understand why backlinks are so important, let’s look at ways to get them.

The biggest factor in getting people to link to you is to offer high-quality content that can’t be found anywhere else. Be different. Be controversial. If people think your site is valuable and unique, they’ll want to link to it.

You should make it as easy as possible for other websites to link to you. Set up a “Link to Us” page that contains snippets of html code they can just paste right into their site. Of course, you’ll make sure your keywords are in the anchor text.

i.e. <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>  keyword</a>

Write some articles and submit them to article directories. They’ll get picked up and reprinted on other sites with your link in the Resource Box.  A single article could bring you dozens of backlinks.

Try contacting a few sites within your niche and offer to write a regular column for them. Or work out an arrangement where you trade content so each side gets a backlink.

Submit your site to free directories that are related to your niche.

Find blogs in your niche and post comments to some of their posts. Be sincere, and you may even form a new relationship with the blog’s owner.

Backlinks are incoming links that are directed to your website from other websites or blogs. It is vital because search engines use the number of backlinks a site has as a measure of its popularity. Internet marketers often then use backlinks as part of a SEO strategy.

Backlinks are very important when trying to get top search engine rankings. Not only do they generate traffic themselves by giving web surfers an active link to click through to your site, but they also increase your PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of measuring the importance and relevancy of a website.

The more inbound links pointing to your site, the higher your PageRank will be. And the higher your PageRank, the more willing other websites will
be to link to you.

As you can see, increasing the backlinks to your site can have a snowball effect on the number of visitors to your website.

Here are few ways you can increase your number of backlinks.

Blogs are a good way to easily get backlinks to your websites. If your content is useful and informative, many bloggers will be willing to establish a reciprocal link with your site. Blog all the way to the bank.
Make it easy for others to link to you by creating a “Link to Us” page and give them the html code so all they have to do is cut and paste it onto their web pages. The easier you make it for them the more likely they’ll be to link to you.
Submit some articles to article directories in exchange for a link back to your site.
Submit your URL to various directories. Google and Yahoo are now the popular means for searches. However, directories haven’t expired out just yet. Some people still use them and the links still count for PageRank.
For a comprehensive list of directories you can submit your website to, check out StrongestLinks.com.
Establish a link to a website in exchange for that website linking back to you. It is called a reciprocal link.
Many webmasters have found great success with the method of reciprocal or cross linking. The key is to not just link to anyone for the sake of linking. Link to sites that are truly useful and relevant to your visitors. When done right, reciprocal linking will work for everyone and both websites will receive a boost in traffic.

It is worth mentioning that there is a caveat to all this overzealous linking. Google is said to be working on an algorithm that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. Be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own several related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy.

Backlinks are a vital part of operating a successful, traffic grabbing website. The more backlinks your website can set up, the greater the traffic will be flowing in to visit. If you don’t have traffic to your website then you are not going to make any profit from your online business

Blogging is a powerful way to generate traffic and if you’re not already doing it you should start now.



The search engines love blogs and you’ll often see blog posts dominate the top rankings for keywords. You can take advantage of this by starting your own blog (or blogs) to generate lots of new traffic and funnel it all towards your main website.



You can build your website as a subsection of your current website or you can build it as a separate, standalone site.



Whichever you choose you’ll want to make sure you link back to your main site. Don’t just link to your home page either. Sprinkle in links to some of your other pages too.



I recommend using either Blogger (good) or WordPress (the best) to create your new blog. They’re both easy to learn and use, and they’re feature-rich and customizable.



You can host your blog on their servers, but I recommend you register your own domain and host your blog yourself.



There are 2 very good reasons for you to host your own blog:

1.  Your url will look more professional and credible.

If you use Blogger, your domain will look like this: yourwebsite.blogspot.com
And in WordPress it will be: yourwebsite.wordpress.com

But if you host it yourself it will simply be: yourwebsite.com

That’s much easier to remember and much more credible to your readers. You may sign up free at both these sites:  http://www.blogger.com and http://www.wordpress.com .

2.  The second reason you should host your own blog is even more important. Many blogs that are hosted on free services like Blogger disappear without warning or reason. It’s happened to many a blogger, and you don’t want to take the chance of losing all your hard work for nothing.

These are keys to a successful blog:

1.  Show some personality. A dull blog won’t build much of a following. Don’t be afraid to take a stand. Stir up a little controversy and get people talking about you blog.

2.  Post often…at least a couple times a week. Stale blogs that aren’t regularly updated quickly lose their following.

3.  Add an RSS feed so readers can subscribe to your blog and be notified when you add a new post.

4.  Find other blogs in your niche and add comments to their posts. Most blogs let you add a link back to your own site. You can use this method to build relationships and links to your site, but don’t abuse it. Post useful comments, not sales pitches or SPAM.

I hope this article is informative and will help in your blogging success.