Summary: Search engine crawlers rank websites that are popular higher. And part of the criteria it uses to do this is determining how many backlinks are out there for the site being evaluated for indexing. In fact, backlinks are more important to the search engine crawlers than keyword-rich website content. This article looks at good linking strategies in SEO.
Search engine crawlers rank websites that are popular with a higher ranking or what is called Page Rank by Google. And part of the criteria it uses to do this is determining how many backlinks are out there for the site being evaluated for indexing. So it is important for search engine optimization that good quality backlinks are acquired for your site. In fact, backlinks are more important to the search engine crawlers than keyword-rich website content. What are good linking strategies to use when running your site through search engine optimization? Let’s take a look at some:
The quantity of backlinks is important to search engine optimization. We will discuss backlink quality for search engine optimization in the next paragraph but you can think of each backlink to your website as a point in favor of your site. The search engine crawler determines that if a site has numerous links pointing back to it then it must be popular and search engine optimization focuses on this principle. What is even better in search engine optimization is when those same backlinks contain your site’s theme keywords.
Relevant backlinks are quality backlinks in search engine optimization. It is best if you get links back to your website on other websites that are relevant to yours. The idea behind this concept is that you want to bring in targeted traffic to your website. Let’s say you have a website for a surfing instruction school in Costa Rica. You may have just set up your surfing school but no one knows about it until you advertise. An effective search engine optimization strategy for your surfing school is to have a link to it posted on various tourism and travel sites advertising Costa Rica vacations. The idea that someone looking to vacation in Costa Rica and who has an interest in surfing will click on the link to your surfing school. We would say those backlinks are relevant in search engine optimization because they bring in targeted traffic.
Look for places to get backlinks to your web site for search engine optimization. So where do you find websites who are willing to place your link on their site? One place to look is at websites that are linking to those you are in competition with. You would find these sites, contact them, and request to have a link to your site. Keep in mind that internet marketing is very important these days and many informational and commercial sites are run solely for the purpose of generating advertising revenue. They may charge you a fee to post your link.
There are however a few sites that allow you to place a backlink to your site for free making them economical for search engine optimization. For example, if you are part of a discussion forum, the forum site usually has a policy for adding your link to the footer area of your posts without spamming the forum. Craigslist.com is a free ad service and you can also put backlinks to your site in your ads.
Avoid using link farms to cheat the search engine crawler. Have you ever searched for something on the internet and when you went to the page you found it only had a conglomeration of links and irrelevant links on one page? If you are like most, you had a big letdown when you saw the page was useless to you. This is what is known as a link farm and some who try to do search engine optimization for a website will use this to try to make the search engine crawlers think there are numerous backlinks to the site being optimized. Today, search engine crawlers like Google have devised filtering schemes to identify these link farms and in some cases an entire domain can get removed from Google’s index as a penalty for using link farms in search engine optimization.
