Promoting your web site takes a lot of work and even more patience. Your strategy should include finding ways to get other sites to link to yours, what is commonly known in web parlance as backlinks. Backlinks serve mainly in establishing your site’s reputation in the major search engines, especially Google. All backlinks are good, but not all backlinks are equal.

Google gives each web site a rating, or pagerank, to indicate its importance. The pagerank value ranges from zero to ten, where ten is the highest rank possible. The formula Google uses to derive the pagerank of your site is a well kept secret, but what is known is that it’s largely based on the number and quality of the sites linking into yours. Thus a backlink from a site with a pagerank of 6 will help raise your own site’s rating much more than one from a site with a pagerank of one. This doesn’t mean that you should reject a link exchange request from a site with a low pagerank, as that site could have a higher pagerank later on and every link that might send people to your web page has an intrinsic value.

Another factor affecting pagerank is the number of total links on a page that links back to yours. If there’s lots of links on a page, the value of the backlink is lessened. Therefore, you should concentrate on getting other sites to link back to you from their blogroll or from within an article, rather than a resource page with hundreds of other links. Over time Google has also started to penalize a site’s pagerank for such offenses as participating in link farms, which are directories that exist for the sole purpose of creating backlinks. What is and isn’t penalized isn’t clear, despite claims by hundreds of SEO (search engine optimization) sites.

Curiously, Google has said publicly that the importance of pagerank has been greatly exaggerated. Truth is, it has some effect on Google’s search engine results, but your content’s keyword relevance is far more important. However, since so many people use pagerank as a gauge of your site’s worth, you can’t ignore it and have to seek ways to improve your rating. Your new web site starts out with a pagerank of zero and will likely stay there unless you devote the time to promote your site in the right places.

Organic links, that is links to your Website that other people put just because they like your content, are the best kind, and they’ll come, but you can’t rely on them when you first start out. There’s a number of methods you can use to create quality backlinks:

1- DO Exchange links with other sites that are relevant to yours. You can do this directly by contacting the site owner or through discussion forums and social networks. DO NOT exchange links with sites that are totally off topic. DO NOT join a link exchange site, as the backlink will be likely lost in a sea of other links on the others’ sites, and for the high risk of being associated with a link farm, which could result in a penalty against your pagerank.

2- DO post in discussion forums related to your site’s topic. Answering someone’s question and including a link to a relevant article you wrote is perfectly acceptable. DO NOT put links to your pages just for the sake of creating a backlink. People aren’t stupid and you’ll soon be barred from that forum.

3- DO submit your links to as many directories as possible. There’s a great number of them that specialize in blogs, while others accept only RSS links. Do them all! DO NOT pay for a listing unless it’s one of the very top directories, or it will be wasted money.

4- DO submit your posts to article or “help” sites such as associatedcontent.com, zimbio.com, ezinearticles.com, ehow.com, squidoo.com and searchwarp.com, among others. The biggest article sites are crawled by Google every day, and some of them allow other sites to copy your article with your bio, which includes a link to your site, thus multiplying the backlinks and potential visitors. Of course, you have to mind your grammar and your posts usually have to be at least 500 words long. Some can just pick-up your RSS feed and do the rest.

5- DO submit your own links to bookmarking sites such as Digg. Not all of them will get crawled, however, but as we said before, all backlinks are good!

6- DO link back to your site from your own accounts on social networks such as Facebook. Again, some of them might not produce backlinks because the content is either dynamic or requires a log-in, but must I repeat that all backlinks are good?

7- DO link back to your posts from your microblogging accounts on Twitter and others. As you build a list of followers, this will be a solid block of visitors to your site every time you publish new content.

Finally there’s another kind of backlink that’s steeped in controversy: paid backlinks through services such as inlinks.com. DO NOT do it! This practice is poorly regarded and will probably wind-up being penalized by the major search engines once they figure out how to identify them. Your money would be better spent using advertising such as AdSense. It doesn’t do anything for your pagerank, but it does produce highly motivated visitors.

Related Articles:

• Are Paid Links and Paid Posts Evil?

Tags: backlink, seo