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What Are Backlinks And How You Can Use Them

What are Backlinks and how you can also use them?

Backlinks - Inbound and Outbound Links - ImageBacklinks are simply links from one webpage or web content to your page or website. They are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks or inword links. Backlinks are essential in today’s Internet and you need to know what it means and how you can implement it properly to score SEO points. If you are looking for more SEO terms to master you can also be my guest. After reading this you may want to go through a basic SEO guide. You should also remember that like spammy content, backlinks should also not be abused. Focus should be more on quality backlinks like on quality articles.

Backlinks – Simplified

Backlinks were very important in the initial days of the Internet, before the search pages came into existence. They were the only way to reach and navigate across webpages. But now with the relevance of backlinks lie with SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It is now used as a factor to determine the page rank of the webpage. Google actually does go a step further. They count a link from for example site abc.com to def.com as a vote of confidence for def.com from abc.com.

How are Backlinks built?

You can begin with pacing a hyperlink of some other website in one of your webpages. That way you create a backlink for the other site. For the reverse to happen you need to do more. You can try out any and all of the following to ensure other bloggers or writers will link back to you. You can,

  • Build reputation: Discuss with other bloggers or writers in forums, comments sections. Criticize other work in a constructive manner and also give tips, appreciate and share good work.
  • Build a rapport: Publicize on Social Networking sites. Publishing the links of your posts on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus creates strong backlinks.
  • Make friends: Search for people blogging of your same niche. Engage with them. Comment their blogs frequently. Be a friend to them. Send genuine advice and link to their posts where possible.
  • Find some breaking news: If you can, post something absolutely new and fresh, something unique that appeals to your audience. That way other bloggers of your niche will be willing to link to your content. Being the first to post about say human-animal marriages will surely earn you kudos.
  • Relevant Backlinks: These are good. If your site has a link to or from labnol.org, it is good only if your blog is also a tech blog. But say your site has got links to websites of bad reputation your page reputation will go down. Relevant backlinks are rewarded by the search engines.
  • Proper Anchor Text: Anchor texts describe the hyperlink that links to web content. If you are linking to your own pages or external ones, having a proper anchor text is important. For example it is like telling the site crawler that
<a href="http://sentence.yourdictionary.com/elitism">Sample Sentences with Elitism</a>

So what is so special about Backlinks?

Backlinks are treated as votes. So if you get good backlinks, that is backlinks from sites of good repute, you will be scoring well on the Page Rank meter. If spammy sites link to you very often you will be penalized by Google. So you need to check who is linking to you. This is how backlinks are evaluated.

Inbound links are weighted against ( link popularity + originating context ). Link popularity says how popular a link is in the search results for the given keywords, while originating context is determined by relevance of the post. Get links from relevant sites with great link popularity and you will do great.

How do you find out who is linking to you?

Over time other writers, websites, bloggers will be linking to your content. You can check who is linking to you.

In Google Search you can type link:<yoursite> in the search box to get the sites that link to you.
In the case of Yahoo Search you need to type in linkdomain:<yoursite>.

You can also search if you are getting bad backlinks. Type in something like this.

link:<yoursite> viagra

This post will now enable you to understand how backlinks work and you can use them for improving your SEO.

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By Sarthak Ganguly

A programming aficionado, Sarthak spends most of his time programming or computing. He has been programming since his sixth grade. Now he has two websites in his name and is busy writing two books. Apart from programming, he likes reading books, hanging out with friends, watching movies and planning wartime strategies.

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