1 Backlink Building Basics for the New Website Owner

By Ezra I Baraka

Now that you have your website built, you'll soon discover that the biggest challenge of owning a website is getting traffic to it. The kind of traffic I am talking about is internet traffic resulting from searches that are relevant to your content. One of the strategies for building traffic to your website involves something called backlinking. In fact, backlink building is one of the major tasks you'll be needing to either do yourself, or pay for a service that does it for you.

What exactly is backlink building?

Backlink building is the process of getting hyper-linked text pointing back to pages on your website. A hyperlink can be a straight forward URL or an HTML hyper link that uses certain words to link back to another site, such as search engine. A back link is rather obvious on most pages because it is usually hi-lighted in another color, and some are underlined as well. Surely you've seen and used them many times before, but those links are the types of backlinks you will be building for your website.

Why do you need to do backlink building?

Backlink building is critically important for your website because search engines monitor and use the number of backlinks to your website as a major influence as to how high they are going to place your website in the search results. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense because if other websites are referring to content on your website using links, then your website is likely to be more relevant than your competition. The key here is to have more backlinks than your competition, and more backlinks that contain relevant search terms.

How do you do backlink building?

There are many types of backlinks that originate from different types of websites on the internet. When backlink building you should always be looking to take a varied approach so as to make your backlinks look natural to the search engines. What this means is that you will approaching other websites, forums, blogs, social media and any other type of web property that allows HTML. There are several common ways to create a link for your website.

1- Create comments on other blog posts around the internet. The blog should have a good PR rank and allow comments. You need to make legitimate, useful, and thoughtful comments so as not to get your post deleted from the blog. At the end of your comment create a backlink for your website as part of your signature.

2- Join a forum and start being an active member. In your profile signature, create a backlink to your website. Forum posting is a big part of backlink building because forums get crawled by the search engines often. That's a good thing for you.

3- Create social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Add backlinks to all of your profiles, and then comment and connect as much as you can with content that is relevant to your website.

4- Create an account at Yahoo so you can participate in Yahoo Answers. This is an excellent venue to not only do a lot of backlink building, but also answer questions associated with your niche. Those answers have a good chance of getting ranked high and can provide traffic to your website directly.

These are just some basic backlink building tactics to get you started on building search engine traffic back to your website.