Back Links - What Are They, and Why Do You Need Them?

People that do Search Engine optimization can spend hours and hours looking for backlinks to their sites or their clients sites. They send out hundreds and hundreds of requests to other sites seeking links back to their sites. And often all they get are knockbacks. Why do they do this? They do this because one of the things that influences search engine rankings is the number of backlinks to your site, and the quality of these sites that are linking back to you. So having a site with a great Search Engine ranking that provides a backlink to your site on their site is a great way to improve your search engine ranking for your site. But how do you get more backlinks with spending hundreds of hours or thousands of dollars?

First, let me say that how much time and effort you invest in this should be relative to the amount of organic traffic that you are looking for to your site. Organic traffic is free traffic that happens when someone types in a search term into Google and up comes your site. Paid traffic is traffic that comes to your site by paid advertising either online or offline. If you want organic traffic the more quality backlinks you have from highly ranking sites, the better your results will be.

For individuals there are some easy ways to create backlinks to your site. There are countless ways to create free pages on the web, using sites like Digg or Google Page Creator, or blogger.com. You can also use social networking sites like Facebook and similar sites to create links back to your webpage. Have your friends got a website or a social networking page. Get them to put a link to your webpage on their site. And you can always return the favour if they have a page they want to promote. What about your children? A lot of teenagers now have their own social networking page or a blog. Get your children to put up a link to your site. Even if this is not cool, they can make it invisible, but it still counts. This is the quickest and easiest way that I know for individuals to create backlinks for their webpage. If you have a number of pages or sites make sure that you create links between all of them. There are many software programs available that offer to create these links for you. At the time of writing I have yet to find one that is greatly effective at this. Your requests tend to get treated as spam when using these programs. This may even penalise your ranking, and I avoid this with my sites. These links may not be of very high quality in terms of their own page rankings, but you can quickly and easily create 20 to 30 backlinks for your page with a minimum of effort using this strategy.

For small businesses the above strategy will also work, and perhaps even your employees will create backlinks for you on their own sites. Talk to your suppliers about trading backlinks. If you are in a business niche that does not have much competition, a few backlinks with some of your suppliers could make a big difference to your search engine ranking.

Keyword and keyphrase selection will also have a big bearing on how much work you have to do creating backlinks. If you are competing for very popular keywords (millions of competitors on Google) this backlink strategy will possibly not make a huge difference to your ranking. But for what little time you invest it is still a worthwhile exercise. If on the other hind you find a keyword or keyphrase that has a reasonable amount of traffic but not much competition you can shoot up the Google rankings. Using this strategy and one of my other strategies I got one of my sites to Number 1 rank on Google within 7 days of going live.

So, if you are looking for organic traffic to your website you cannot ignore the value of creating backlinks to your site. Backlinks can be created quickly, easily and cheaply using any number of the readily available tools and sites on the internet. And good keyword selection will increase the power of the backlinks that you create. Save yourself the heartache of spending hours and hours looking for backlinks only to face the cold shoulder of rejection. Create your own.