Backlinks and Their Importance to Online Survival
When it comes to generating traffic to your website, nothing is more valuable than backlinks. People have different terms for this idea – i.e. incoming links, inbound links, etc. – but the general idea is the same. Someone comes to view your site or reads your post and thinks to themself, Hey this is pretty interesting. Then this person creates a link to this site or post somewhere else so that others can see this same intriguing information. The are numerous methods of getting others to link to your content from simple link exchange between webmasters, getting your posts bookmarked through social bookmarking sites like Digg or StumbleUpon, or you can post to popular article submission sites with your link in the text or signature block.
You might be thinking to yourself, Yeah that’s all pretty interesting, so explain to me why I need to know this? Your efforts to direct web-traffic is what gets people to your site, and people at your site clicking on your Adsense or buying through your affiliate links is what gets you paid, right? So the more backlinks you have floating around out there, the greater likelihood someone well make it to your site to help you make money.
What most of you will find is that backlinks have become increasingly important in the realm of Search Engine Optimization(SEO). SEO is a vast topic in itself of which people make a very good living helping companies promote their websites. Getting high in the search engines for paricular keywords is another way to get traffic to your site. One of the things search engines like Google use to rank the importance of your site, and subsequently where they will place it on the list of search results, is the amount of backlinks to your site and articles. Backlinks on higher ranking sites are even more important. Search engines take into account the amount of backlinks to your site because it is a representation of the importance of your site to others out on the web. There are other aspects of your backlinks the search engines will account for, but this is the general idea.
I came across a great quote not too long ago, and it one of the most important things to keep in mind when creating sites from which you wish to generate income. Build your sites as if Google doesn’t even exist. Too many people are out there trying to beat the search engines; it’s like trying to beat the stock market. Nothing is better than word of mouth when you want to generate hype for anything, and the online form of word of mouth is backlinks. Time is always money, so you have to weigh the value of the free traffic you get from backlinks against the value of the time you invest in getting these backlinks and the money you might spend shortcutting doing Pay Per Click(PPC) arbitrage through programs like Adwords.
But say Google were to go bankrupt tommorrow or suddenly your favorite search engine no longer exists. If you have a significant following of people who have come to your site based on banklinking word of mouth, you wont starve because the majority of your traffic was never based on search engines anyway. But if Google were to go out of business, I guess you wouldn’t be making anymore money from Adsense anymore either, but I digress. This is not to say that you shouldn’t care about search engine traffic, but the point is that if you build websites that people enjoy and tell others about, the search engine traffic will come naturally.
So, to help you in making some quick backlinks to your site, check out this nifty little tool – Onlywire. This tool is great because you can use it to add your sites or blog posts instantly to roughly eighteen different social bookmarking sites. You just have to subscribe to the various sites first before you get started.
Good luck.
Joel Henderson is an avid writer and fitness enthusiast. You can read more of his articles at Best Triathlon Wetsuit, Blood Pressure Monitors Now, and Electronic Body Fat Scale.
