Back-Linking Strategies
By: Patricia Brucoli 

It's no secret that getting other websites to link to yours (reciprocal linking) is an important part of your website development and Search Engine Optimization. Steady, strategic link building can help you, not only maintaining your website traffic, but also increase it significantly as well.

However, when adding backlinks to your website be aware of a few things. It's about quality, not just quantity. Having thousands of random websites pointing a link to you might not always be a good thing. If your link comes from a page with hundreds of links on it, the search engines may deem it a link farm and it will not help you at all, and may even harm you in some cases.

Search engines prefer a link to your website from a website where the page content is relevant to yours. For instance, if you have a website that mainly promotes Health and Beauty Products, you do not want to have a link from a website about Cultivating Orchids in the Amazon. Your link will not likely be seen as relevant to the visitor of the Orchid Society and search engines will also view this linking as non-relevant. Non-relevant links may not hurt you in any way, but they will also not be an effective use of 'real estate', in that they will not be considered as important as relevant links.

On the dark side, if you are linked to sites that send spam, are scams, or use black hat techniques, the search engines may 'paint you with the same brush', and/or realize you must not know who exactly you are linked with. It is best therefore, to check who your link partners are by visiting the sites to be sure they are what they say they are. Of course it would be difficult to know everything about them, but just try to see the obvious. If you are not doing indiscriminate (massive) linking, it may be a benefit to actually look them up by "Googling" them and just see if there are any negative comments. At the very least, just make sure if it says 'BabyToys.com' that it isn't actually redirected to SeedyTimes.com.

You can get backlinks to your website using a number of different methods: Writing product reviews that allow you to post your URL; Writing articles and submitting them with your website link in your resource box; Submitting your website to directories; Submitting your website to classified ad sites; Posting in forums with your website URL in your signature; Responding to blog postings in niche forums; Ask for a link exchange with other relevant websites personally (ideal).

Building steady and strategic backlinks to your website can benefit you in a number of ways, in particular: Get your website indexed and crawled by search engines; Increase your overall search engine position for keywords or phrases due to higher PR; Increase your visitors from strategic placement of your website link; Possibly also increase brand awareness for your name or business name.

If done properly, building backlinks can greatly increase your website traffic . Just do a little at a time and you may be surprised with the results over a short period of time. There are even companies and software programs out there that will help you build your backlinks if you have the luxury of an operating budget for your business. Start getting backlinks to your website today!

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