Building Backlinks To Your Websites – An Introduction

If you are trying to build income producing websites – you need to build back links to get your website to the top of the search engine listings. Once you are at the top of the listings you will get search enginevistiors (assuming you chose the right keywords in the first place) and now you have potential customers.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is simply a link from one site to another – click here is an example. In most software from WordPress to Microsoft Word – you highlight the words you want to link to and then click the “link” button which look like a chain. In WordPress you will get  various options but the only thing that really matters is the “target”. If you need the html code – and you will a some point I can assure you – its fairly simple to – here is the html -for the “cick here” code above

<a href="http://google.com">click here</a>

In this example the anchor text is “click here” and target is gooogle.com.

Why Do Backlinks  Matter?

Search engines seem to count a backlink as a vote for your site. Someone thought enough of your site to  link to it .  This is where the mythology that if you write good content you will do well with the search engines comes from. As with all good myths – it has a kernel of truth – and in this case links are important and you need to get some. However before you start getting keen – take a moment and learn what type of backlinks do you want.

What’s a Good Backlink?

There are two key things which makes some links worth more than others: the anchor text and the website it comes from.  First anchor text  are the words that are highlighted in the link “click here” in the above example. What I am saying is that the website we are going to (google.com) is about the topic “click here” – helpful ? Not really. If I wanted to give a better backlink I might do something like this:

<a href="http://google.com">Internet search engine</a>

that’s more descriptiive of what a link is about – in these case Google is a search engine – so this is a good link.

Now taking another example: I have another blog. That’s not a very useful link – even for the reader it doesn’t tell you what that blog is about – if  instead I told you I wrote a blog about Passive Income Online that would be a better link.  Now I’ve associated “passive income online” with my blog – and as that’s the term I want to rank in the search engines for that is all good.

This link is in fact a very good link to have – its inside a post on the page: its not a comment link or a blogroll link in the sidebar – it counts much more because its a contextural link – a link within the context of the page, post or content of a website.

So a good link is contextural with the anchor text of one of your keywords. Now in fact the link about is even better than that because this blog, the site giving the link, is in a similar niche to the one that I linked to – so I now have a contextural, correctly anchored link from a related websites.

That’s worth more than if I’d linked to this website from a dog agility website or a Las Vegas hotel website.

Where to Find Backlinks

Now this is where it gets difficult, especially when you are just starting out. Once you have quite a number of your own websites then you can sometimes link from to another. That’s not possible when you are just starting out- but fortunately there are places you can publish your content for free in return for backlinks.

There are numberous article directories: but the most important one is EzineArticles – check out my guide to how to write good articles for EzineArticles

You  can also join revenue sharing websites such as HubPages and Infobarrel, which can both allow you to earn and income and get backlinks.

That’s a just a couple to get you started – there are an awful lot of places to place your own backlinks once you start looking.

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