Getting Backlink Guide

Many times I’ve heard it asked in webmaster forums: “How many
backlinks do I need?”. Worse yet, many more webmasters never ask
that question. Instead, they ask why they are not listed well with Google. Investigating their site we find a severe lack of backlinks in almost every case. There are also those of us interested in raising our PageRank with Google for various reasons, (usually egoistic in nature), but what does it take to raise my PageRank one notch upward?

Getting To The Top

For the first question, the number of backlinks needed to have your site listed in search engine results depends greatly on the competition for your keywords. Do a search for your most wanted keyword and notice how many results are returned. The higher that number, the more competitive your keyword is and the more backlinks you’ll need. If the number of results returned is more than one million, you’re in for a tough battle to the top. You’ll need thousands of backlinks from trusted sites. On the other hand, if the number of results are less than 100,000, your journey to the top ten search results will be much easier; 1,000 backlinks from decent sites should do the trick. Lastly, if the number of results is less than 10,000, you should be able to place in the top ten with just several hundred good backlinks.

Increasing Your PageRank

The second question, how to increase a site’s PageRank, is an even trickier question to answer. Explaining the original PageRank algorithm, PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)), is beyond the scope of this article, however, we can make some educated assumptions without being math Phd’s. The first and most important assumption regarding Google’s PageRank algorithm is that it is based on a logarithmic scale
of 5.5. Remember, this is not fact, but just an educated assumption among those who have studied the algorithm. The logarithmic scale of 5.5 means that a Google Toolbar PageRank, (TBPR), of 2 is roughly 5.5 times as important and as valuable as a 1. This same “importance” factor can be applied to any TBPR.

For example, a TBPR7 is equal to 5.5 TBPR6’s.

Therefore, if your homepage has a TBPR5 and you are striving to increase it to a TBPR6, you’ll need 5.5 times as many backlinks as you already have assuming that your new backlinks are of the same quality as your current backlinks. That’s a huge leap! Alternatively, you can try to get backlinks from sites that have a high TBPR, such as TBPR5. If so, five to ten TBPR5’s should bump your site up to a six. That’s over simplified, to be sure, because the numbers showing on the Toolbar are approximations.

David Benware is an avid researcher and writer particularly interested in the areas of keywords and pagerank. To learn more about these topics, visit his websites at: http://MisterTypo.com/ and http://megalinkexchange.com

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Do you have a new website? Are you new to the whole website scene? Perhaps you’ve heard talk about backlinks or inbound links. What are they, and just how important are they?

Well, let me say this: they can be the one most important factor when it comes to your Google PageRank. If you don’t know what that is, it is a way that Google has of “grading” your site, for lack of other words. When your web page gets ranked it is with a value of PR1 to PR10, with 10 being the highest.

If you aren’t familiar with the Google PageRank, download the Google Toolbar from their website. Once that is done, if you look to the right of the Google search button, you will see a space with a green bar with the word PageRank above it. You can gage a web site’s page rank by where the green bar is within that space; half way would be a PR5, while all the way would be a PR10. You probably won’t see too many of the latter, but that is exactly what you want to strive for.

What you want, as a webmaster/webmistress, is to have a high quantity of high ranked websites linking back to yours. These are backlinks. Their linking to you is tantamount to their voting for you. And the higher their PR, the more weight their “vote” holds. So, what you want is to have a large number of high ranking websites linking to yours. Once this is accomplished, your site will be seen as having “votes” from websites that have already proven their importance. Consequently, this will move you up in rank. It’s sort of like osmosis. Or being guilty by association, but in a good way.

Now you can go about the acquisition of these backlinks in a variety of ways.

Some believe that the best way to accomplish this is to study your competition. Do a search for websites using your keywords. Take a good look at the top five results. This is your direct competition. There are numerous ways and tools to help you look at the sites that link to your competitors (these are the same sites that you want to link to you). One easy way is to use your Google Toolbar. Simply type in: link:(your competition’s URL), i.e. link:www.theirsite.com. The results will determine who you will contact regarding linking back to your site.

Once you have the results, what you will do in this scenario, is to find a contact person on each website. If you find none, you can try to address your correspondence (which we’ll get to in a moment) to webmaster@(URL), i.e. webmaster@ theirURL.com (I have put an unneeded space there for editorial purposes). Sometimes addressing your email to the webmaster works and, honestly, sometimes it doesn’t.

Once you have a list of contacts, you want to write a nice little email asking them if they would be so kind as to link to your website. The truth is that most will want you to return the favor. This isn’t as good as a one way link, but better than no link at all!

When you contact them it is best to be both complimentary and courteous. Let them know that you have visited their site, why you like it, and that you would like for them to link to your website. You will find that quite a few of the sites you visit will, in fact, have a page or two in place dedicated to link exchanges. That’s fine, it saves you some time. Keep a record of who you have contacted and when.

Many webmasters believe that it is looked upon, in a better light, if you place their link on your website first. You can always remove it if they are not interested. Your email might say something like this:

Dear Webmaster/Webmistress:

My name is (your name), and I am the webmaster/webmistress of (yoursite.com). I have noticed your website, because it is so similar to mine. My site is also about {whatever topic pertains). I was just wondering if you would be interested in exchanging links (I use this example because it is easier to get them to respond if you are going to return the favor, but you don’t have to). In the event that you are interested, I have already placed a link to your website on mine. You will find it at: (exact location of where you have put their link) i.e. http:// www. yoursite/links.htm, or whatever the location ends up being (note that again I have placed a couple of unnecessary spaces).

Let me know if you are interested. I look forward to hearing from and thank you for your time.

Sincerely, etc, etc.

You can also go one step further and include, in this initial email, the information they will need from your website if they decide to take you up on your offer. You will need to supply them with the title of your website, a description, your URL and perhaps the html code you would like them to use. Make sure to ask them for a response.

Again, you need to keep track of all of this, and the sooner you do it the more likely you will be to make it a habit. If you fall behind, you may be forever catching up

Now, the next thing that you want to do is to take every site that accepts your invitation and submit said site to Google. By doing this, you get Google to crawl that site and see their link to you. Brilliant! Does this sound like a lot of work? You bet it is! But it doesn’t cost you a thing (except, of course your time, which can be very valuable). I haven’t mentioned yet that, depending on the subject matter, your competitor could have thousands of backlinks, and so far you’ve only tackled the first site on your list. Whew! I’m getting tired just telling you about it!

If this sounds too time consuming for you, there are tools that automate the process. True, they will cost you, but they sure will speed up the process.

You can also purchase links. Sometimes this is the only way to get a link from a website with a high PageRank. This can be quite expensive.

But regardless of your time or your budget, this whole backlink thing can, in fact, be accomplished. How long it will take is the question.

Some believe that it is better to accrue these backlinks slowly; that achieving too many backlinks quickly will be frowned upon by the search engines. Others believe that the only thing that matters is getting the most links as fast as you can. I think it is something that you must decide for yourself.

Quickly or slowly, no cost or high cost; these are the questions you need to ask yourself. Once you’ve decided on a game plan, you simply have to implement it. Don’t be afraid. The worst that can happen is that your invitation gets rejected. So, you move on to the next one. It can, in fact, be a never ending process, but what a learning experience!!

Good Luck!

For an ABSOLUTELY AWESOME and FREE SEO eBook, click here.

Addie Scott is also the author and illustrator of a soon to be published children’s book and is working on a how-to internet business ebook. You can visit her website at: http://www.flirtdirt.com

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Here are some useful tips to optimize your site for search engines:

Frames

Using frames in a website can simplify the web design work. Unfortunately, most search engine crawlers have trouble moving around a framed site and may fail in adding all your pages to the listing.

Sitemaps

Making a sitemap will make sure all the pages on your website are indexed by the search engines. If you own a dynamic website, you can use Google Sitemaps and XML to create a dynamic sitemap that will update along with the website itself.

Redirected Homepage

This is probably the most common mistake people make. All web server software has some way of telling which page is the default homepage for the site. If your homepage www.yourdomain.com redirects itself to www.yourdomain.com/anotherpage.html, then you need to change anotherpage.html to whatever file name your web server reads, most likely index.html or index.php. Why? Your domain name is what most people will link to from other websites. If your homepage isn’t exactly that domain name, you’re missing a lot of backward links that probably will boost your search engine rankings quite a bit.

Use META Tags for Duplicate Content

Many times search engines index same or similar products as duplicates, which results in the product page disappearing from the listing. To make your product unique from the other similar products out there, use the META tags to your advantage. Make sure you have a unique title, description, and keyword tag on every page of your site.

Horace Lai, journalist for http://www.ECommerceDay.com, has well over 5 years of experience in search engine optimization and email marketing.

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