Internet Marketing For Newbies: Backlinking

Backlinking is the process of building links pointing to your website to help you rank well in the search engines. Who am I kidding? Your real goal is to rank well on Google. The other search engines are great but Google will big your biggest source of traffic.

Backlinking is essentially the process of getting a link to your website onto other websites. This can be done in a number of ways. But first let's make sure you understand a simple concept: dofollow and nofollow.

Dofollow links will allow search engines to crawl your link on a website and follow it back to your website. They will then index that link and give you credit for having a link on another website.

Nofollow links are the opposite. A search engine will more than likely see your link, but they won't follow them to your website and you won't get credit for having that link. It is said that Google likes you to have some nofollow links as it makes your link building look more natural, but some people prefer to just aim for dofollow links to maximize their backlinks.

Dofollow and nofollow linking is determined by the webmaster of the website you post your link on. Many times a website that allow dofollow will get spammed with people wanting backlinks and the owner will get fed up with the spam and change the coding so that all liinks are nofollow.

First of all there is the most honest way of doing it. Simply contacting other webmasters and offering to place a link to their site on yours in exchange for a link to your site on theirs. While this is a decent way to get relevant backlinks and expand your network, it's also a very slow process and you're likely to get rejected.

The next way is social bookmarking. There are websites designed to allow you to add all your bookmarks (or "favorites") to their website and you can then log onto the website from anywhere in the world and access all of your bookmarks. However, in terms of search engine optimization, this can be exploited for backlinks. There are lists of social bookmarking websites if you look around a bit. When you add your website to these social bookmarking sites, other users can see your bookmark and go to your website. Due to the amount of people using social bookmarking for SEO purposes, this is fairly unlikely. But when a search engine crawls that website and finds you link, you've now got credit for another backlink.

Another way to get backlinks is commenting on blogs/articles. Some blogs/articles will give you a place to insert your link and some may not. If they don't have a place for your link, you can simply include it in your comment. Like any other site you'll have dofollow and nofollow sites. Both are good, but you'll only get credit for your dofollow links. A word of caution, do not go blog to blog just dropping in your link. Many blogs are set up so that the owner has to approve comments before they are visible to the public and search engines. This means spammy comments will be denied and deleted. If you want to post your link on blogs or articles, make sure to leave a nice comment that contributes will to the blog post or article. You're far more likely to have your comment approved (even with your link in it) if the author knows you read through the content and actually have something interesting to say. Sites like Hubpages or EzineArticles generally allow comments on articles and the links are normally dofollow.

If you're looking for more in depth information on internet marketing, you can check out sites like Internet Marketing For Newbies.