Why have backlinks and what are they?
Backlinks are hypertext (i.e. blue line) links that point to a particular page on your web-site from another web-site. These are seen by Google as a vote from the originating site indicating that the location it is pointing to has some value. Whatever text the link has also tells Google what that page may be about. So if you have ten links pointing at your page that say some variation of “dog training” then your page may appear in the search listings for dog training. Other factors apply here so don’t get wrapped up in this explaination, it is cursory.
Google loves to use backlinks as a voting mechanism. The more links that say dog training from various sources the more likely it is to rise in the search results page for that search term. As long as the links are of decent value (not from spammy sites) Google will count them, raising your ranking and therefore increasing your amount of visitors to your site.
How do you build links?
The hard way to do it is to ask. You look for other websites that are related to your topic (not neccessarily compittion mind you) and attempt to contact the webmaster for the site. You offer the webmaster something useful on your site that they might can use such as great content that thier readers might could use or perhaps an application or program that is available. Alternately you can have an article written to give that somehow relates your website’s topic with the other webmaster’s topic and include links back to your site.
The up side to this is that you can come back with some high quality links which are beneficial. The down side is that it is a massive amount of work involved. Between contacting webmasters that may ignore you to following up ensuring link placement to making sure that the content is relevant and interesting… it can be a daunding task.
Is there an less hard way?
There’s two ways that can make the hard work less hard. First is using a service that does it for you. This would be like you hiring anyone else to find and generate the links for you. This usually can be expensive and you have small control over where your links go.
Second is using a program service that automates the task for you. There’s plenty of versions of program out there that can provide this task, however none of them are equal. There’s at least three traits that you need to look for in order to get your money’s worth.
Three way links
Even the resemblance of reciprocal linking may hurt the linking power. Make sure that there’s no necessary links back from your site.
Multiple IP addresses
Google loves variety. The more spread out across the net the better.
Slow growth
Google loves to penalize for unusual activity. Make sure that the addition of links to your site are a few at a time so that it appears more natural
Customized links
Make sure that you can put your keywords in the links to your site. There is small use of backlinking if you cannot tell Google what your page is about through the link pointing back at you.
