Okay, so this week were going to be focusing on back links and doing a lot of posts about back links and how they can improve your search engine ranking.
So what is a back link?
Your at this page right? You got here by following a link. You may have seen the link on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, or maybe you searched Google but the important part is you got here!!! We'll start by telling you what a link is, it's clickable text you fan follow to another web page, it's actually called a hyperlink but for simplicity sake we'll just refer to these as links.
When a link or hyperlink on another website points the Internet user to your site that is what's referred to as a backlink.
Content
CONTENT IS KING!!! Sure you can buy backlinks, do link exchanges and a whole lot of other nonsense. Not to say you shouldn't do these things but the quality of these backlkinks most likely isn't the best and your probably wasting some of your time as not all links you create are follow links, some are no follow links, we'll get more into that later.
This blog post your reading right now is content. Every word, pictures, or video you see on this blog or any other is considered content. Good content is going to be what's going to get you traffic, visitors to your website and other people linking to your website so focus on your content and the traffic and backlinks will come.
You can publish your own content, you can buy content from other people to add to your site, you can bring on guest bloggers or do article exchanges with other bloggers to get more content for your site. You can also write for other sites and sell your content.
Traffic?
What is traffic? I write this blog and other blogs and websites so that people can read it. All of you people out there who visit my website or blog and read my content are called traffic.
Why You Want Backlinks?
So now were going to tell you why you need backlinks, that's what your wondering right? The only way your going to find yourself to this page your reading is by following a link also known as a hyperlink. This link will either be served by a search engine like Google, or by another website linking to my site and this page in particular. This is referred to as an internal link.
If there's no link to your site there's no traffic to your site and if there's no traffic to your site what's the point, it's not a website or a blog it's a journal and nothing wrong with journaling but that's not what you've set up to do and you don't need to pay for hosting and domains to journal..
Let's say I buy some backlinks on pointless sites nobody visits which is normally what you get when you buy a backlink. Someone might stumble across that link find my post and read it but most likely not many people.
However let's assume I got a link from a really popular site like DuctTapeMarketing.Com. Many people will follow this link back to this blog post of mine. To you it's a link, however to me it's a backlink, and a very valuable backlink at that. It's a backlink to me because it comes back to my content.
A good backlink brings traffic to my site to read my content. If my content on this blog is especially awesome it will have hundreds if not thousands of people linking to it creating hundreds if not thousands of backlinks to my site. If that happened my site would receive a lot of traffic all due to these backlinks.
What The Hell Does SERP Mean?
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Pages. What causes one website to pop up first on the first page of Google and another to show up on the bottom of the 55,123rd page of Google? Part of the reason is links.
Google has robots, bots, or spiders as people refer to them and they crawl the web and bring back what they find. What they bring back is info gathered by following links regarding what a web page is about, what that web page links to and what web pages link to that page. Are you confused yet?
I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible but its a bit confusing when you're new to SEO. Let's say this spider comes across content or a web page with just one link to it. Google and other search engines are going to think it's not very important because if it was lots of other sites would probably be linking to it as well.
Let's use another site as an example. We'll say FoxNews.Com. Lots of people link to FoxNews.Com so Google is going to see that and assume it's important.
Okay so we talked about a small unimportant website with one incoming link and FoxNews.Com which has thousands of links. Let's say both of these sites run a story about the 2012 Elections. Even if both these sites have the same hot topic article, Google, and other search engines are going to present FoxNews.Com's article at the top because the links tell the search engine that site is more important even though both sites have the same content.
Now this can seem daunting trying to compete with the big boys in your niche area, however don't get discouraged. A lot of sites and a lot of content out there has no links going to it so even just a few can be big in Google's eyes, especially if your blog or site is about a very small niche topic.
Okay Were Done...
I was going to discuss "Anchor Text" and how it relates to links and SEO however your mind is probably fried already so check back tomorrow and we'll post a bit about anchor text.
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