Backlinks

Diary of an Affiliate Marketer

Now that I’ve got the website up and running on Wordpress and I’ve made some changes using Thesis I have to say I’m really happy with the results. Yesterday I put the opt-in form on the right sidebar so the whole thing is looking better already and I’ve already had some people opt-in which is cool.

So today I need to get some links to the pages which is an important part of the strategy for search engine optimization. There are a few reasons why links are important and one of them is to allow the search engines to ‘find’ you.

There is a general feeling that your pages can be given more weight if Google finds them rather than you informing them, initially at least. Later your pages automatically ping the engines are get spidered.

Another reason for links is because Google and the other search engines see links as one of the things to measure your popularity with. Strong links from good websites is the key. James Martell is a master of this and runs a workshop on backlinks.

One of James’s methods is to have a professionally authored article (PAD) written on your topic and submit to the webmaster of one of the top ranking websites in your market. The offer to the webmaster is a free article which is very valuable to his website also.

All you want him to agree to is that you have placed three backlinks back to your website using your best keywords within the article and they are to remain untouched. Most webmasters will see the value for them in this arrangement and upload the article.

Now as far as Google is concerned when it spiders the webmasters website is that this website (who Google ranks highly and you chose carefully) thinks you are good enough to link to and therefore you must be good! Just one way to get highly thought of by Google.

By the way, you can get a PAD article written up for $10-$15 on www.Elance.com

Yet another reason for backlinks is page rank. This used to be an important factor when Google first introduced it some time back and as Google has kept developing it has lost some of its importance but it is still worth building your page rank.

One way to do this is through links back to your website from another website that doesn’t have ‘no follow’ tags on the links. This means that some of the page rank on their site leaks through the link to your site and increases your page rank.

I purchased a great piece of software for this called Fast Blog Finder by G-Loc. I’ve used it for a while now and it does a great job of finding blogs that have your keywords. Even better still it is simple to configure the blog finder to find blogs with high page ranking that don’t have the ‘no follow’ tags. Then it’s a simple case of reading the article and leaving a suitable comment.

So that is what I have been doing today, reading a lot of articles and leaving comments that has started the backlink trail back to my site. It will be interesting to see how quickly I can get the page rank up.