How To Aquire Backlinks To Improve Website Search Engine Rankings

There are two general groupings of SEO techniques, on-page factors and off-page factors. In this article we are going to be talking about the off-page factors, which relate to building backlinks to your site.

Get backlinks, and lots of them, should be an ongoing part of your SEO. As long as you build your links in a way that looks natural, the more links you build the better off you will be. It looks a lot more natural if you work on getting a handful of backlinks every week than if you suddenly got 10,000 backlinks overnight because you bought them from a link farm. Unnatural patterns are noticed by the search engines and they can penalize your website if they associate it with these practices.

There are many ways to get backlinks. You can develop relationships with other website owners to exchange links from other related sites. Be an active member in forums related to your topic and be sure to have a link to your site as part of your 'signature'. Create articles that include a link back to your site in the 'bio box' and submit them to article directories. Create Squidoo lenses or HubPages with, you guessed it, a link back to your site. If you have a blog submit your RSS feed to RSS Aggregator sites, and add it to your Squidoo lens or HubPage. Bookmark your webpages using Social Bookmarking services and encourage visitors or your site to do the same. Send out a 'tweet' using Twitter when you post a new article or add content to your website. This is just to get you started, it's not an exhaustive list by any means.

Now that you know where to get backlinks, the other important aspect is that, when possible, you use good anchor text for the backlnks you create. The anchor text is the text that turns into the hyperlink (it's often blue, sometimes underlined). The search engines also use this text to figure out what your site, or page, is about. So if possible, specify what you want the anchor text to be.. You want to use your main keywords, and variations on your main keywords. Try to vary it a little (that looks natural), while still keeping it relevant of course. Keep in mind that the keywords you use when you are linking to a specific page are not necessarily going to be the same as when you are linking to your homepage.

In some cases you don't have the option of specifying the anchor text. But it is important to take advantage of the opportunity to when you can specify it. If you exchange links with another site, specify what you want your anchor text to be. The other webmaster will probably appreciate it because it saves them time having to decide what it should be. You will have total control over the anchor text when you create Squidoo lenses, HubPages, in article bio sections, and your forum signatures. Use it wisely.

In this article we've discussed the basics of getting external links back to you site. By applying these techniques until it becomes second nature and you should see an improvement in both your search engine rankings and an boost in the traffic to your site.