Saturday, November 27, 2010

SEO and Backlinks

What are Backlinks or Inbound links?

The popularity of a website is based on the links that it receives. Backlinks are the links that enter your website. Backlinks were the only source of web navigation few years back, before the emergence of search engine optimization. Now, backlinks are the backbone of search engine positioning. Backlinking is very useful for the people who cannot afford more money on advertising. These links lead to a web page and back lead to another web page. The backlink works great with the websites that is designed with high quality, well established and with good rank.

There are numerous techniques used in the internet market to gain from backlinks. Some of them are article submissions, Directory submission, press release, blog posting and social networking.

Why search engines consider backlinks to rank a site?

The search engine treat your website is like a Ballet Box. So, it takes every backlink to your site as a vote. Depending on the number of backlinks received, your website is branded in the search engine. So, if your site receives more backlinks, then your site has something useful or informative for the audience.

At present, knowing the value and importance of the backlinks, people have started selling and buying it which is not a good sign for online business. So, people who can spend money to purchase backlinks shines and others with empty pocket are dumped in a corner. This forced the Google to take action on the sites that are selling backlinks. Even this strong punishment could not completely bring solution and even now you can find some culprits in the internet market.

Even though it is a cause of worry for the people who could not spend money on buying backlinks, still they can do better with good content. The content plays the vital role in grabbing the attention of the audience. So, if you can post keyword rich and informative rich content, then you are sure to win the race. The content should be related to your business or that is useful for the audience. You can drive traffic to your site through blogs. Posting blogs will have great impact in building your website and improving search engine rankings.

A Backlinking strategy seems to be easy. For some it also looks like a fun. But, through backlinking, a website owner may learn more and get the opportunity to meet new people. The slow and steady process will definitely lift your website to the first page in the search engine optimization.

SEO Company

There is a continuous rise in the number of people creating their own ecommerce sites or online businesses because they know there is good money from them. These also brought about new and a myriad of services that help these businesses achieve their goals. And one of these are firms offering various seo services. It is a fairly young industry and therefore most of these companies are under a decade old. But that does not mean they do not know what they are doing.

When your business is based on a website and relies heavily on the web to get your conversions or to get people to find you, definitely you need the help of search engine optimization or seo. Especially in the organic results where most of the really good traffic actually comes from. If you want to succeed in your own online business, you certainly want to rank at the top of these results.

But achieving it is not easy especially if you are in a highly competitive industry or what they often called a niche. You need all the help that you can get. If you know next to nothing about seo, you can educate yourself about it through free and paid means. But it is best that you leave the task of doing your website's seo to a good seo company who has the experience and the expertise to get the job done for you. You pay an extra for this but think of it as a great investment and from which you will be reaping equally great rewards for the years to come.

Here are a few of the seo services that you can expect to get from your seo firm.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the starting point with any search engine optimization. You need to know what keywords you should be targeting to help you get a high ranking in the organic search results. You need to know what keywords your potential customers will be searching for and definitely aim for those keywords. Your seo company do this seemingly tedious process for you and come up with the best keywords for your website or business. On this part, you may have to cooperate with them so they can have a better understanding of your business and from there work out the initial sets of keywords where they will be basing their research.

Link Building

If keywords are the ones that start your seo campaign, it is the link building that fuels your search engine optimization. Because the best way for your website to rank for a certain keyword to have a good link building strategy built for it. It is all about the anchor text that carries your keyword. It is all about linking to relevant websites. It is all about getting links from reputable sites and so on and so forth. Your seo company should be able to provide you an effective link building campaign to give your site the boost it needs.

Social Media Marketing

The internet is all about connecting with other people and usually this is referred to as the social media. More and more seo firms today are offering social media in addition to their other usual seo services. Find an seo company that has a good grasp of Web 2.0 and the social media and has a track record of working within that sphere.

SEO Specialist

Search Engine Ranking is a buzz word that you will hear all over the Internet. If you want your website to rank high on any of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, you use a method called SEO. There is no doubt about the fact that if you want your business to be successful online, you have to rank on the first page of the search engines.

Do not expect too much traffic if your website is not on the first page. Almost 40% of traffic is generated from the Number one ranking spot in Google for any given keyword. Almost 90% of the traffic is generated on the first page.

No one set of rules will make this happen for you, but it is rather a series of good SEO strategies that will get your site to the top. First learn the Key elements of SEO or get a SEO Specialist to do it for you. Develop your own optimization system as you learn more and more tricks and tips.

You can learn the basics of SEO by means of online courses and systems. My advice to you will be to get a good understanding of how SEO works or hire a good SEO Specialist that can do it for you.

Using an algorithm, the likes of Google decide which site will rank at the top. They keep this algorithm a secret, but I have found that if you apply a few principles you will almost always get to the top position. Some basic principles are things that they look at and will influence any Search Engine Ranking.

Content is one of the factors that can make a great difference in getting to the top of the search engines. The Search Engines are always looking for good quality unique content to display to their visitors. If you have good quality content that is unique, you already have a good chance to get better rankings. If you write that content yourself it is far better than copying someone Else's from an article directory. With that said however, I had instances where I ranked number one with Directory articles as well.

There are a lot of other factors that also influence search engine optimization. According to what I have found, back links is the second largest factor of search engine ranking. When doing SEO you must ensure that you don't just use any links, as some links will rather get you penalized than helping you. If you take some time and learn the basics of SEO and back links, you will be well rewarded.