What Are Backlinks?

Finding quality links, and determining what backlinks you will accept should be considered a very important facet of your own online business. With the many changes that Google has put into place and will put into place, it is very important to your online health to follow the rules or expect to be banned by Google.

As you will learn by my article, you need to be ever vigiliant and not solely rely on the good faith of your linking partner. I realize that seems a little harsh, but I'm speaking from experience. Keep a list of your linking partners, choose wisely, and check the sites where your link should appear on your partner's site , periodically.


What are Quality Backlinks?
By Vickie J. Scanlon

You hear a lot about backlinks and how important they are to gaining page rank. But what are quality backlinks? How do you get them? What do the search engines like and dislike? All are good questions that I hope to answer for you?


Quality Backlinks Defined
Backlinks are links that link back to your site. But the stickler is the linking partner. Yes, the linking partner is important to you and to the search engines. If you have a site that is about “Shoes”, you should look for linking sites that will complement your site and have at least an equal page rank as your own site. For example, if your site is about shoes, you could search and request a reciprocal link to a web page or site about “Shoe laces”, or “Shoe accessories”, or even “Specialty Shoes” that you don’t carry on your site or have any knowledge about.

Why is relevancy of your backlinks important to your own site?
Relevancy of links along with equal or better page rank of your linking partners will help your own page rank. Why? Because these quality, complimentary sites will help the search engines robots begin to notice the importance of your site.

Quality backlinks will help to increase targeted traffic to you and your linking partner


Backlinks to avoid
If you want to remain in good standing with the search engines, the quality of the inbound links should be considered.

1. No hidden links (blackhat tactics)
2. Link Farms – where they automatically generate web pages who’s only purpose is to provide links for websites. This is a major no-no. Why? Not only may the search engines disregard these links, but your website might be banned as well.
3. Interlinking of your websites from the same IP address. If you have several websites and you are interlinking between the two – you should keep the links to a minimum. The interlinking of websites can hurt you in the eyes of the search engine robots.
4. Be careful whom you link to. Google is working on a patent – who knows it may be complete, that will help them to determine the popularity of the sites being linked to, and the trustworthiness of a site that you link to, from your own website.


How Do You Get Them?
When you are first starting out, the best way to get quality backlinks is through:
1. Article writing
2. Forums

Then once you have a page ranking, you can begin to request links from other sites that are relevant to your own site. Please remember the word relevancy – you do not want to link to a site – nor does a site want to link to you – if you are directly competing with them. You want to be able to offer your linking partner a service or product that will compliment their site, as well as, give their visitors additional quality sources to visit. This should be reciprocated from your site as well.

Things To Be Aware of When Linking
With any linking program, be sure to have a list of your partners and the web pages where they have placed your link.

It is important. Why? If they take your link off their site without notifying you—you’ve just created a one-way link to them --they receive the traffic, you do not. Don’t think that will happen? From experience, I can say, it most definitely can. So, be forewarned – periodically check your links. But there are other nasty tactics. If you want to know some of the other nasty tactics that can befall you, just grab my free ebook on my site.


Though, not comprehensive in nature, this article should give you a great start in getting your own linking program started.


About The Author:
Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: http://www.myaffiliateplace.biz/ for free tools, articles,ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, travel and tech accessories,software and computers -- all geared to help the affiliate/small businessperson online. Visit her blog My Affiliate Place Blog for more articles and personal insights.