SEO tips: Backlinks aka inbound links Search Egine Optimization 101.

People everyday ask about SEO and how it works. The one issue is sites like “Google”, “Bing”, “yahoo” and search engines in general have an algorithm. Such algorithms are top secret for it is their way of business and to insure that their competitors cannot obtain their secrets. If said secrets were given away it would give an advantage to the other search engines and the company that received it. For the sake of this article I will be referring to “Google” as the main search engine for they own the majority of the market.

As SEO amateurs it is our job to get an idea of what the algorithm is and what the “bots” prefer in the sense of page rank. I say amateurs only because the true professionals are those that actually know the algorithms, in other words the employees that cannot help us due to confidentiality reasons. One thing that has been known for a while is that Google bots (also known as spiders) use backlinks and/or inbound links as a factor in page rank. An inbound link is a link of your site elsewhere; Be it a blog or another website. Typical copy and paste does not necessarily work as well as an actual inbound link which looks like this <ahref=http://YOUR WEB SITE.COM/>Text that you want to show up as hyper link</a> . One may say how shall this work? Well several sites that allow one to comment you can always leave your link there or pay to have your back link on a well known page. I have yet to pay for a back link because it can be done on without paying a dime so why waste the cash. Also social networking sites can set some good inbound traffic. 

Inbound links are very important because it shows popularity and expands your realm of visitors. One thing that should be noted that I experienced myself is that the links need to be completed by hand. If one were to pay to have backlinks done by software it may be caught by the search engine spiders thus banning your site not necessarily because it was done by software (but that I bet can do it alone) but because your link may be placed in irrelevant places. Plus placing your link in relevant places will be only beneficial to one anyways because one will be honing in on their market.

Get your site popular enough and the back links will come naturally. Remember solid content is a must; it is the foundation of any site. If the content proves well the link will be passed on by your visitors and not manually by yourself. Remember that old saying “six degrees of separation” basically saying you are only six people away from knowing everyone. The theory behind backlinks can be applied in the same sense. Six links on unique pages may cause a chain reaction. Again though as stated earlier, if your content is not rich the site will not push itself.