BackLinks

In my previous post about keywords, I mentioned checking out your competition by Googling sites with keywords inanchor. These are backlinks that are incoming to your site from other sites, and the link is embedded or anchored on a keyword.

Now the backlinks you get naturally from other sites who have discovered your material rarely get anchored on specific keywords. It happens sometimes if the writer of the other site is imaginative, but most of the incoming links will be embedded on anchors such as "click here" or "this article" or even the name of your site. Now it's always nice to have as many backlinks as possible, and the search engines expect that links to your site will have a large variety of words (and will be suspicious if they were all anchored on keywords), but the most powerful incoming links are anchored on popular keywords.

If you get sufficient numbers of incoming links anchored on specific keywords from decent authority sites, then you shoot up the search engine results pages (serps for short) for that particular keyword. Backlinks and backlinks anchored on keywords are key to getting traffic from search engines.

This post will concentrate on getting the links anchored on the keywords that you are targetting. The only way to get incoming links anchored on your chosen keywords is to do it yourself. The most popular way to achieve this is through article marketing. This is where you write articles on various sites with a backlink to your main site anchored on your keyword.

Article writing can be timeconsuming, especially as each article needs to be unique, but it's well worth doing, as once the articles are in place, you should start getting steady traffic based on the backlinks, but sometimes additional redirected from the article itself.

Where can you publish articles online? One site that accepts articles with no charge is ezinearticles. They will place ads in your articles (that's how the site pays for itself) but from your point of view, you get an online article that you have written with a backlink to your main website. Another site that allows you to write articles and place links in them is Helium. Helium doesn't like blatant self-promotion but they allow you to place links on articles where they are relevant to the subject written about. Helium also place ads near your article, but they share revenue with the writer. You can also write articles with links on sites such as Gather and some of the newer social bookmarking sites such as Newsvine allow members to write original articles with links.

When writing articles, make sure you optimise it. You want the article to have value in it's own right, so that it directs traffic to you in it's own right as well as providing a backlink.

Another alternative to submitting articles to the article sites is to set up a network of blogs. This is easy to do with free blogging services such as Blogger and Wordpress. The idea is to set up a series of standalone blogs, which you build up in traffic and pagerank authority in their own right (it usually takes about three months). Once the blog has authority, you can include links to your main site in the blog posts and in the blogroll in the sidebar of the homepage.

Note that if you are using a network of blogs to promote your site, the blogs must be related in content to your main site. The search engines get very suspicious if you have a blog about say gardening, and it links to a site about car parts.

The other thing to do when setting up your blog network is to spread the blogs far and wide across several platforms. It's no good setting up a dozen blogs on Blogger all under the same login, as it is easy for Google to realise that all the linking to your main site is coming from one user. Therefore spread the blogs out on different platforms, and under different user names, and make sure that each blog has unique content. There are plenty of free blogging platforms out there. Aside from Blogger and Wordpress, try Blogsome, Xanga, and others. The more the merrier really - the only caveat is to take some trouble to ensure that each blog gains pagerank.

Building backlinks via a network of blogs with decent pagerank is more powerful than simply through article submission so if you are short of time try the blogs first. Of course always remember that the more backlinks the better, so if you have time, try everything.

One final thing - try to do this slowly over several months. The search engines are looking for a natural increase in backlinks. If you suddenly get loads of links in a couple of days they will ask why. Now it might be because you got mentioned on a national newspaper website or social bookmarking site and lots of other webmasters then wrote about you and linked to you - or it might be because you went out and bought a whole bunch of links (which the search engines frown upon). Just be aware that if you build links too fast a flag will get raised. Be patient and do a little every day.