Posts Tagged ‘links’
Before I tell you why you need one way backlinks perhaps I should provide some information on what they are and how they differ from other types of links.
The term backlink is used to differentiate incoming links to your website from outgoing links or links between other websites. One way backlinks are links from other sites that you have no outgoing links to. The situation where you link to another site and they link back to you is called two way or reciprocal linking. There is also three way linking but that’s another topic for another article.
Most webmasters are familiar with reciprocal linking. This type of link exchange has existed since the beginning of the Web. Many of the millions of websites on the net have mostly reciprocal links and few or no one way links. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links, so why all the fuss about one-way backlinks? The simple answer is that search engines place more value on one way backlinks.
Search engine ranking is largely a popularity contest. A link from a website is like a vote in that contest. Google and the other search engines use the logic that if one site links to another without requiring a link back they consider the linked site to be a valuable and relevant resource. Both reciprocal and one way links have the potential to give your site direct traffic, but one way links will give a much bigger boost to your search engine ranking.
The above gives you a glimpse at how search engine ranking works but is not the whole story. There are a number of factors that make some one way backlinks much more effective in improving your search engine ranking than others. Here are some of the major factors to consider:
- website authority
- links per page
- website and page topic
- keyword rich anchor text
- keyword context
- keyword diversity
- link diversity
More explanation of these factors will need to wait for future articles and I will link to those articles from here as they are written. You may want to consider subscribing to my newsletter or the RSS feed of this site to be alerted to updates. You can also read about how to get links to your website for more information that will help your search engine rankings.
Simply because you are visiting this site I know for sure that you are looking to get links to your website. I don’t know if you’ve been around the Internet as long as I have, so I’ll give you a little background information. I was actually using the Internet before there was a World Wide Web and everything was text based. In those days there were no links and no websites as we know them today.
The World Wide Web came into existence in 1990 and thus was created the quest to get website links. However, for about six years, there was only one motivation to get links to your website. That motivation was to get direct traffic to your site. In 1996 Google appeared on the scene and added a new reason to get links to your site. Google started using link popularity as a primary way to determine which sites were the best for any particular keyword.
Today Google accounts for almost 80% of all Web searches and Web search is the primary way people find websites. That fact makes getting a high ranking in Google the most important factor in having a successful website. That leads us to the point of this article. If you want to succeed on the Net you need to know how to get links to your website.
The old fashioned way to get links is to exchange links with other webmasters. Link exchanges can be manual or using automated systems. Unfortunately, two way links don’t have he power they once did for increasing your rankings. They may get you a little direct traffic, and they are worth doing if you can do it without spending a lot of time on it. However, one way links carry much more weight in getting your site ranked in the search engines, especially Google.
So how do you get these coveted one way links? You can buy them, but there are many drawbacks to buying links which I will go into in more depth in another article. For now, I’m just going to post a list of other ways to get one way links and I’ll give you more details on how to use the methods in future posts. Here is my “short list” of ways to get one way links:
- Blog Commenting
- Forum Posting
- Directory Submission
- RSS Feed Directories
- Social Bookmarking
- Article Marketing
- Classified Ads
- Press Releases
- Link Baiting
- Guest Blogging
- FFA Sites (not recommended)
- Posting on Advertising Blogs
- Creating Free Blogs (lots of these sites will be detailed later)
- Building Your Own Hosted Blog Network
- Your Circle of Online Friends
- Sneaky Backdoor Listings (mainly free service registrations that get your links on authority sites)
- Subscribing to One Way Link Services
The list is not in any particular order. I’m sure I will be adding to the above list, but that gives you a good start. As mentioned earlier, look for details on all these methods soon. If you have ways to get links to your website in mind that I missed that you would like covered please post a comment and let me know.
