Backlinks improve page rankings

Written on August 14, 2008 by koko

Every webmaster aims to have their website rank high in popularity searches and good webmasters know to achieve this is dependent on website content, style, search engine optimization and the use of keywords to attract the main target audience and also the attention of search engine crawlers.

The first step in attracting more users from your target audience and thereby increasing website popularity is to submit your website to popular search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, AltaVista, Cuil, etc.

In many instances though your main keyword may be so broad that this strategy will only bring about limited success. Take for example the keyword “web design.”

When a person types “web design” in the search engine window of their browser, whichever search engine they have selected will return all sites related to the words “web design.” In the case of Google this is about 231 million references.

Trying to get your website on the first or second page of listings for such a topic is no easy task and submitting your site to search engines alone will have only a limited affect.

To try and increase page ranking a good webmaster will optimize their site with a range of keywords, descriptions, and most importantly, a number of external links and (hopefully) linkbacks from other websites.

External links and linkbacks are the placement of your URL on other websites. The more linkbacks you have from other peoples websites the more traffic you are likely to generate from people clicking these links and visiting your site.

By increasing traffic (visitors) to your site you have a better chance of increasing your page rank in search engine results.

Quite often people will link back to your site without telling you. They might find something interesting or useful on your site and post a link to your site on their own website for the benefit of their visitors.

Likewise you might do the same. Internet courtesy dictates that where a person links to your site, you should provide a similar link to that persons website on your own entries.

How many linkbacks are there guiding people to your website? Who are they? What are they linking to in particular?

If you don’t know the answer to any of these questions and would like to help is at hand. Simply visit http://www.linkpopularity.com/ and insert your URL in the search pane and you will see what links there are to your website according to Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

If you don’t have any linkbacks to your site then now is the time to start adding some to your pages and hope the people you link to do the same for you. In many instances a short email to the webmaster of the site you are linking to will see the courtesy reversed.

If you implement linkbacks and external linking as part of your internet strategy I’m sure that after a short period of time you will start to see your page ranking increase, as well as increased web traffic.

Posted in Search Engine SEO