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Backlinks and SEO

Nashville SEO - Search Engine Optimization

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The term "backlink" is simply technobabble which refers to a link to your site from any other website. Google generally knows when other sites link to your website and uses this variable as a rather heavy factor in ranking your site; in fact, this variable may be weighted second only to the website's content in terms of importance. This makes the number of backlinks - sites that link to your site - a truly important number (if you are concerned with search engine optimization on Google).

There are many methods that can help to increase your backlinks, and like most other facets of search engine optimization (SEO) - including Nashville SEO - they consist primarily of common sense.

One of the most common ways to increase backlinks is also one of the most annoying, and as such we do not recommend it: sending emails (or otherwise contacting) the owners of other websites (basically, strangers cold calling strangers), asking them for a "reciprocal link." In other words, folks using this technique send often voluminous email requests which basically say, "Please add a link to my website on your site, and in return I will add a link to your website from my site." While I do not get as many of these requests as I once did, I still receive far more than I'd like. These reciprocal link requests are considered to be spam by most people.

A better place to start your backlink campaign is to make a list of organizations - companies, friends, acquaintances, etc. - with whom you do business, whom you know, and so on, and communicate effectively with them about your desire for a link on their website(s). First, compose a standard form letter (using Dale Carnegie principles, of course) which will serve as your starting point for the email you will send them after you personalize it and make it something much friendlier than a form letter.

Here are a few other ways to increase your backlinks. Later, we will elaborate further on a few of these techniques.

Backlink Quality

While the number of backlinks you have is important, so is the quality of those backlinks. A link from a reputable site is much better than a link from a junk site. A link from a popular site is far superior to a link from a rarely-visited website. A backlink from a site with a high Google PageRank is better than a backlink from a website with a low PageRank.

Google PageRank

Backlinks work in a variety of ways in boosting the ranking of a given site on Google and other SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Google and the other major search providers (the others are becoming less relevant with the domination of Google) use complex algorithms that quickly decide which pages or links get shown in which areas of the SERPs. For Google, the result is known as PageRank, a variable given to a site.

PageRank is basically a measure of the importance, credibility, and reputation of a given website. Google's PageRank is established is by taking into account the number of links leading into your website from other sites; therefore, each link to a given site from another website could be considered as a "vote" from the external site. Google then tallies those votes to determine how reputable and worthwhile a website actually is. Therefore, the more backlinks to your site, the better ranking a website can achieve.

Google's PageRank also takes into consideration the quality of the backlinks. A link from a highly regarded website can be worth several times more than a link from a lowly regarded, poorly-pageranked site. This is why it's important to increase backlinks using a SEO strategy that incorporates sites with high PageRank values.

Article directories are continuing to be one of the premier ways to do this. The best article directories carry a lot of weight in the search engines, and links from them will boost your SEO that much more.

When you want to improve your SEO, you are probably looking for more than merely a boost in the search engine rankings; you are really looking for more referral and direct traffic as well, while boosting your status and presence within your target market and their communities and networks. Link building through strategies like article marketing, blog posting, forum posting, blog commenting, etc. will all help you achieve these goals.