Improving search engine ranking is the cornerstone of any Internet marketing strategy. Backlinks are a vital part of the process. Links back to your website show Google and other search engines that the information or products you offer are valued by others. In a very real way, backlinks are the backbone of the search engine. They convey a site?s authority and direct search engines to take a site more seriously. Backlinks were one of the original metrics used to determine search engine rankings for various keywords and increasing backlinks continues to be a central way to improve search rankings.
Knowing that you need more backlinks to improve your positioning on search engine results pages is one thing. Getting them is a different story entirely. These tips can help you increase the number of backlinks to your website to drive your organic search engine ranking higher.
Content is Key
The primary ingredient for getting and maintaining a high number of quality backlinks is good content. If you don't provide information that people want to link to, the links won?t happen. While there are many strategies to exchange links or buy links, in the end, the best strategy of all starts with providing unique, original, useful and well-written content.
Article Directories
Writing articles about your niche subject and linking back to your website from article directories provides link juice that translates into improved search engine rankings. That's due in part to efforts by the article directory sites to accept only high-quality content, so expect to provide good information and excellent writing in trade for these backlinks.
Write Guest Blogs
One of the best ways to get backlinks to your website is to write for another website. Many blog owners look for experts to write articles for their blogs. Get to know the best blogs in your niche subject area. Contact the owners and offer to write an occasional guest blog or article in return for a link back to your website. The blog gets an expert writer and you get a boost in the search engine ranking algorithm.
Forum Signatures
Participating in online forums and linking back to your website is as great way to demonstrate your expertise. The one caveat with this backlink strategy is that you must make meaningful contributions to the discussion groups you join. It's time-consuming but it pays off in two ways - backlinks to your website and added credibility for yourself as an expert in your field. This, in turn, leads to more links to your website.
Launch Blogs
An excellent way to build your own backlinks is to start a blog - or many of them - and link back to your website from each blog. Again, the key is to provide unique, high quality content on each blog and to link to your website using anchor text with the right keywords.
Obviously, each of these backlink strategies requires time and effort. If you don't have the time to implement these strategies successfully, your best option may be to hire an Internet marketing company to do the work for you. If you decide to outsource the work of building backlinks to improve search rankings, take the time to research companies and choose one that regularly gets excellent results.
Author Resource:
Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the world's MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web.