The Beauty of the Backlink

One of the most effective ways you can increase your search engine ranking on Google and Yahoo is through backlinking. I am not saying that you should throw all of your keyword research out the window. You still need to know what people are looking for. The key is though to be on one of the first few pages that pop up when they do the search for the keywords… and that happens when you use backlinks.

See the search engines have gotten smarter over the years. They realize that people who wanted to jump the rankings with their site would simply place keywords on their site in so many places, so that when someone typed in “making money on the internet” their site would pop up… even if the site had nothing to do with making money on the Internet. I know that you have been caught by one of those sites, you are taking the time to do research, you think you have found a great site that is going to help you, the keywords show up in the description, you click on the site… and once you get there you find the site has nothing to do with what you are looking for. But it had the right percentage of keywords to get better ranking.

So you have a legitimate website, where you have information that people can use. You have done the research and you know the keywords to use… but you are still not climbing the rankings. That is because part of your marketing needs to be spent on getting backlinks. In order to get backlinks, you need to understand what I mean by a backlink.

Simply put a backlink is a link that is on one website, which when people click on that link they are then taken to another website. You have seen a backlink, they are on many websites. I have them here on my site under the Proxy Lists. Some people put them into the content of the article and they are also known as hyperlinks. They are normally underlined and or highlighted blue. If you click on it you go to another site, if you roll over it you can see the web address.

The key is to make sure that you are backlinking to reputable sites that are also popular. So if your site deals with fly fishing and you decide to backlink to a popular and high ranked site that deals with rock collecting the link is not going to help you… and chances are greater than not that the rock collecting site isn’t going to link to you because fly fishing has nothing to do with rock collecting. You need to find sites that are in your niche.

Once you have a backlink, Google tags it. Google will record the phrase that is used in the link, they save it and as they gather information about your site and your backlinks Google then establishes what ranking you will get. This may lead you into thinking that you should have hundreds of backlinks then. Unfortunately Google frowns on that, what you need is quality backlinks. “Search engines work under an assumption that not all links hold an equal amount of weight.” This means that if you and your buddies have websites, all of which are not ranked… but you all decide to help each other out and backlink to one another… Google is not impressed. You need to have a link or two from sites that are well known and popular if you really want to improve your ranking.

Building Backlinks With Social Bookmarking

The Internet is one of the most highly competitive marketplaces in history. With over 15 BILLION different websites on the Internet, there are sometimes tens of thousands of businesses searching for one of the few top-ranking spots on the most popular search engines. Once you have achieved one of the top spots, you will have to continually fight to maintain that spot, as more and more competition will start mirroring your website to help them get a foothold in the search engine rankings.

The best way to help your website climb in the rankings is by implementing as many strategies as you can concurrently to keep your site at the top of the top!

One method available that should be implemented wherever possible is social bookmarking.

To get an idea of what social bookmarking is, let’s consider a few different things.

– What is a bookmark?

– Why use a bookmark?

– Why make them social?

– How can social bookmarks help build backlinks to your website?

What is a bookmark?

A bookmark in a book reminds you that you wanted to go back to that particular place. It basically holds your place, so you can get there easily when you are ready.

A bookmark in the computer does essentially the same thing. It holds your place.

Why use a bookmark?

On the Internet, with billions of websites that you maneuver through to get to that one site that has particularly useful information, you will want a way to get back there quickly, so you save the address as a favorite or “bookmark it” for easy future reference.

Why make them social bookmarks?

The bookmark option that comes on your computer, which is also often called “favorites,” can become rather messy and hard to work through. An active Internet user needs a solid way of organizing them, which is precisely what social bookmark sites do!

Also, if they are social, then you can benefit by looking at the bookmarks of like-minded people and get access to sites that they have discovered that are particularly useful to them. If you are interested in collectible spoons, then don’t you think it would be beneficial to discover what interesting places other spoon collectors have found?

How can social bookmarks help build backlinks to your website?

Everyone who bookmarks your particular website has created a link back to your site, which advances your ranking score on search engines. If you have especially useful content on your website and it gets bookmarked by your targeted audience, other likeminded people will look at their bookmarks and save them for themselves as well. This goes on and on and on! The backlinks increase exponentially.

To encourage others to link to you, book mark your own site and tag it with especially targeted keywords. As others use a social bookmarking site to search for sites that are good enough to bookmark, the entering of your keywords will lead them to your site.

There is much more to this concept, but hopefully, I have got you excited enough about this concept that you will plant the knowledge in your brain and let it grow!