Backlinks – Your Ticket Into The Search Engines

Everyone with a website wants to be listed on Google. After all, it is the most popular search engine in the world, used by millions of people every day. It’s the doorway between you and thousands and thousands of visitors who will flock to your website once they spot you, and isn’t that the main purpose of putting up a website?

Although getting listed isn’t the only thing required for you to get visitors, you also want to achieve a good rating, a high ranking (preferably in the top 10 results for your chosen keyword) which will put you in the spotlight and which will give you the opportunity to get noticed. But perhaps your site is brand new on the block and maybe you think it’s too small to be picked up by Google. Relax – that isn’t even an issue, just sit back and look at all the options you have.

First of all, let us clear out a fundamental point: There are, as you probably know, two ways of doing things, namely the right way and the wrong way. Now, although the wrong way is clearly wrong, it is of some importance that you know it thoroughly so as to avoid it completely.

Following is, to put it mildly, the avoidable way of trying to get listed on Google:

Google provides its users with a way to put their URLs in queue for crawling at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Now the utter failure of this method probably has a little to do with the mechanics of the process. You see, once you have typed your website’s address into the space available there, it is simply put in a queue (behind oodles and oodles of other pages) for the GoogleBot (a software program designed to follow links on websites) to, well, crawl.

Anything can happen after this. For one, your site might not get crawled at all, or suppose it does get crawled (which in itself is about a million in one possibility) it might take weeks and it probably won’t even be indexed by Google (!). So ultimately there’s no telling where that URL of yours will end up going. But I am guessing wherever it goes, it won’t go anywhere near the first few pages of search results… So in other words, this way is a complete waste of time! No one has really ever benefited from it and if you ask me, no one ever will.

And now the more likely way to get listed by Google and the other major search engines.

If you want to climb up to that coveted spot on the Google search engine then simply “piggyback” on the popularity of another site. Once you add your URL to some other (popular) site, it might get a chance to be spotted by the GoogleBot and followed upon.

That chance of getting the links followed will be your golden ticket into Google. And the better the site that your link is on (e.g. high Pagerank and/or lots of high quality content), the quicker it will be followed. Nowadays, to get indexed quickly and ranked well, it’s all about having backlinks from other sites…

Backlinks from Web 2.0 Sites

So, here’s what you can do, you can either put up your URL in a queue together with something like a million different sites or you can use a little sense and put it up on a few popular sites which will provide you with the sort of traffic even a couple of a dozen others won’t. Pick a few popular sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com or Propeller.com (solid Web 2.0 sites) to plant your flag into, and soon you’ll sink your teeth right in to Google itself…

I know what you are thinking: You are probably wondering just how you will manage to get these larger sites to list you on their sites and in the course grudging me for putting you on the same chase yet again. But don’t worry – I promise it’s not as hard as it sounds. Just write some newsworthy article and submit it to these sites.

Or use a different type of Web 2.0 sites altogether: The social bookmarking sites. You can easily list your URL together with a description on sites like Del.icio.us or Blinklist, Furl, Del.irio.us and dozens more. Just create an account with these sites and you’re ready to submit your URL. Most of these sites have a high Google Pagerank and are crawled on a daily basis. This will get you into the search engines quickly. And not just into Google but into all the other popular search engines, too.

Backlinks from popular Forums

A different way to get backlinks is to join a few discussion sites and forums and get involved in discussions about topics related to your website theme. When making a post, you can put up your hyperlink along with your signature line which is a completely legitimate way of getting traffic to your site. That is to say as long as you are contributing something useful to those discussions.

Warning: Don’t try and get prompt results by pulling smart tricks like typing in your hyperlink and adding a spammy GO HERE! caption. That won’t help you earn anything apart from a good whack from the moderators of the sites. Think of a good headline for your site and use that as the description for your signature line along with your URL.

Invest some time in this and really participate in the discussions. Once you’re doing that, you will earn the liberty of sharing your URL with others. Try to use your main keywords for your link text as it will improve your search engine positions for these keywords (e.g. like this: Car Repair Guide – do not click it – it’s just an example!)

If you have a certain feel for writing and you are proficient with words then you have an advantage over others like yourself. Believe it or not, you can put this talent in line to work on your behalf.

Backlinks from Article Submissions

Write a few well researched, well planned out articles about topics which might appeal to your target market (do some keyword research first to see which keyword phrases have the least competition in the search engines). As in the previous method, there are no shortcuts here and nothing, absolutely nothing, besides quality content will do you any good. Try and act smart, don’t simply copy & paste text from elsewhere or simply try to get away with a badly done job and you will be at the receiving end of a royal brush-off from readers and editors.

Writing an article is really not as hard as it sounds. Since it’s about your main interest, a little research wouldn’t really cost you much time or labor. Record your results, go ahead and experiment with a few situations, come up with hypothetical situations to explain particular problems and provide your analysis or solutions for them. Once you have done a good job (and believe me when I say you will know when you have done a good job), proudly provide your own name and hyperlink of your site at the end of the article.

Then submit your article to the big 3 in article marketing:

EzineArticles.com

ArticleDashboard.com

More4you.ws/articles

By having a backlink from one of these sites, not only will you get indexed quickly, it will also help you to get ranked better. You can submit the article to more sites, but not always is more better. If you’re doing too many submissions too quickly, your site could land in the “Google Sandbox”. This means that you won’t get listed for at least 6-8 months and then Google will re-evalulate your site and see if it’s one of the “good” sites or rather a spam site.

Conclusion:

If you want your site to get listed in the search engines quickly, you need to get backlinks from popular websites. These links can be from Web 2.0 sites (incl. blogs), forums or article directories.

What about reciprocal linking? Well, the times for making use of that kind of 2-way linking strategies are almost over. The backlinks still count to some extent but reciprocal linking is seen as a “scheme” by Google which is used to manipulate the pagerank of the participating websites.

Therefore, if you want to get backlinks from directly related sites, it should be done as a 3-way linking. Meaning, site A links to site B. And site B in turn links to site C which is also owned by A. This way, the search engines can’t see this direct relation between the participants. And better than doing this on a separate page would be if the link would come from within the content of an article.

The higher the number of sites you are added to, the better your chance of getting your website link known. But be careful: You need to spread out your submissions over time. Doing too much too quickly can get your site banned aka getting hundreds of backlinks over night are signs of a spam site (especially if these links are all using the same link text for the URL).

As your popularity increases, so will your chances of getting high search engine positions in Google. Good Luck!