Ranking well in the search engines for highly competitive phrases takes more than just on-page SEO tactics. It takes backlinks and lots of them.
A backlink is simply when the owner of another website or blog links to your site. As you’ll see, a few high-quality backlinks can be far more powerful than anything you do on your own website.
To search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, when someone links to your site it’s like they are voting for it.
Someone thought your content was valuable enough to link to, so it must be important. The more people linking to your site, the more important it must be.
Even more important than the number of links to your site is the anchor text. Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. For example:
This is Anchor Text
Above is the HTML code for a link to a site called yourdomain.com. On the web page, the anchor text is what readers actually see.
Search engines see anchor text too, and they use it as a way of determining what your site is all about. This is why you want anchor text of incoming links to include your main keywords whenever possible.
So now that you understand why backlinks are so important, let’s look at ways to get them.
The biggest factor in getting people to link to you is to offer high-quality content that can’t be found anywhere else. Be different. Be controversial. If people think your site is valuable and unique, they’ll want to link to it.
You should make it as easy as possible for other websites to link to you. Set up a “Link to Us” page that contains snippets of HTML code they can just paste right into their site. Of course, you’ll make sure your keywords are in the anchor text.
Write some articles and submit them to article directories.
They’ll get picked up and reprinted on other sites with your link in the Resource Box. A single article could bring you dozens of backlinks.
Try contacting a few sites within your niche and offer to write a regular column for them. Or work out an arrangement where you trade content so each side gets a backlink.
Submit your site to directories that are related to your niche.
Find blogs in your niche and post comments to some of their posts. Be sincere, and you may even form a new relationship with the blog’s owner.
