What are Backlinks and why should I care?
Links are links from your site to another site so for example if you had a barbers shop and your partner had a hairdressers shop you might want to link to that site and send all the people looking for highlights to your partners site. Backlinks are simply links from other sites to your site so if someone landed on your partners site wanting a shave with a straight or 'cut throat' razor your partner would backlink to you, it's that simple.
OK so what does that have to do with me?
After you've taken care of your onsite SEO probably the most important thing you need to tend to to get yourself raised up through the Search Engine rankings is Backlinking. The way the search engines look at it is that that other site has given you a vote. But these 'votes' are not all created equally. Some of these votes are looked upon by the search engines like for example the votes from the electoral college in a US Presidential election...
The vote from the State of California has a weighting of 55 electoral college votes.
The vote from the State of Wyoming on the other hand is only worth 3 electoral college votes.
So 1 single backlink from a California type website can easily outweigh many votes from Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Vermont, Maine, Idaho, Hawaii and South Dakota type websites combined.
How do I get links?
There are many ways you can spend your days commenting on blogs, or getting testimonials, requesting links on other people's sites, paying for people to put backlinks to your site on their site, buying banner ads.
But if you want quality links you'll have to do the research to find out where the quality links are a good place to start is find out where your competition are getting their backlinks from and then either get the same sites to backlink to you, or get better backlinks than them, preferably both.
I heard mention of a Link Circle what is that, should I do it?
A link circle is created when a series of relates sites in obviously related businesses connect to each other. For example the carwash connects to the mechanics and on to the tyre fitters and on to the tune up shop who's connected to the wreckers, who's connected to the towing company who's connected to the car parts shop and back to the carwash. As long as all the businesses are keeping up their part in maintaining their backlink score this kind of thing is beneficial for all businesses. If one business isn't keeping up their end of the bargain it will drag all the others down with them.
Links are links from your site to another site so for example if you had a barbers shop and your partner had a hairdressers shop you might want to link to that site and send all the people looking for highlights to your partners site. Backlinks are simply links from other sites to your site so if someone landed on your partners site wanting a shave with a straight or 'cut throat' razor your partner would backlink to you, it's that simple.
OK so what does that have to do with me?
After you've taken care of your onsite SEO probably the most important thing you need to tend to to get yourself raised up through the Search Engine rankings is Backlinking. The way the search engines look at it is that that other site has given you a vote. But these 'votes' are not all created equally. Some of these votes are looked upon by the search engines like for example the votes from the electoral college in a US Presidential election...
The vote from the State of California has a weighting of 55 electoral college votes.
The vote from the State of Wyoming on the other hand is only worth 3 electoral college votes.
So 1 single backlink from a California type website can easily outweigh many votes from Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Vermont, Maine, Idaho, Hawaii and South Dakota type websites combined.
How do I get links?
There are many ways you can spend your days commenting on blogs, or getting testimonials, requesting links on other people's sites, paying for people to put backlinks to your site on their site, buying banner ads.
But if you want quality links you'll have to do the research to find out where the quality links are a good place to start is find out where your competition are getting their backlinks from and then either get the same sites to backlink to you, or get better backlinks than them, preferably both.
I heard mention of a Link Circle what is that, should I do it?
A link circle is created when a series of relates sites in obviously related businesses connect to each other. For example the carwash connects to the mechanics and on to the tyre fitters and on to the tune up shop who's connected to the wreckers, who's connected to the towing company who's connected to the car parts shop and back to the carwash. As long as all the businesses are keeping up their part in maintaining their backlink score this kind of thing is beneficial for all businesses. If one business isn't keeping up their end of the bargain it will drag all the others down with them.