Home Based Business - Building Backlinks in Seven Steps

As a home based business owner, you're probably familiar with the term SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization). You probably know this relates to how you set up and wrote the content for your website so that it would get high rankings on the search engines. But did you know how much backlinks contribute to the success of your website? Lots of quality one-way backlinks-meaning links from another site to yours for a legitimate reason-help improve your rankings in those search engines.

 

While there are services that will sell your links, and sites that allow you to swap large numbers of links with other users, these can be seriously detrimental to your search engine rankings. Major search engines are aware of this practice, and when they're able to ferret it out, they penalize sites for doing it. It's far better to get a dozen one way backlinks over the course of a month than to purchase 1,000 paid links or make a quick 100 link trade. Fortunately there are many things you can do to organically develop backlinks to your site that will boost your search engine rankings significantly. Here are seven great ways to get high quality one way backlinks to your website.

 

1. Write and Market Articles. Whatever your website is about, you can write articles about your topic that other people will find helpful. Then you can use these articles at article sites where people are looking for information. This can generate traffic to your website at no cost to your advertising budget.

 

There are numerous sites where you can place these articles where they will get lots of readers. Goarticles.com, eHow.com, and ezinearticles.com are three such sites that get lots of interest. You can write the article, make it helpful and informative, and then include a link to your website and a brief biography about yourself as the writer in a resource box on the page with the article. With some of these kinds of sites, you may also be able to embed links into the article that can add more backlinks.

 

 

2. Create and Market Videos. You can also create interesting and helpful videos about the topics you deal with on your website and then publicize your video. The more people that watch your video, the better results your website will get. And the more they pass your link to that video along to their friends and contacts, the more backlinks you can get which will raise your rankings in the search engines. You can get lots of great backlinks to your video via a newsletter, reference to it in a blog or a forum, etc. You may even be able to include your link in your signature when you respond to posts on other people's websites and forums-just be sure you check the rules first.

 

 

Twitter is another great way to announce new video content. On Twitter you have 140 characters with which to convince people to click on a link to your site. This can be very effective because of the huge number of people who use Twitter to quickly search for information.

 

3. Utilize Social Bookmarking Sites. Utilizing social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg.com, and stumbleupon.com, you can also generate some good backlinks. Whenever you submit a link back to your website on these services, visitors will see your link when they are looking for information and may opt to visit your site. They can also go to your videos and give you a positive mark for being a quality website with quality content. The more feedback you get, the more viewed your video will be and the better the backlinks you will generate.

 

4. Use Squidoo Lens. Similar to the article sites listed above, Squidoo publishes content you submit. However, in this case the content is called "lenses" and includes video, pictures, and text. You use a multimedia approach to share information and garner readers. You can create lenses about many topics-such as your home based business or specific products. These lenses will help generate backlinks and traffic to your website.

 

5. Create Your Own Hubpages. Like Squidoo, Hubpages lets you create pages containing content to include text, pictures, video, and links. It's easy to do. Just create your own account and get started. You can create lots and lots of Hubpages for different specific topics to get more traffic coming to your website and generate new quality backlinks, as well.

 

6. Submit Your Website to Directories. Similar to search engines, directories list websites based on their relevance to a keyword or keyword phrase. However, directories are more subjective because they are evaluated by real live site editors who decide how applicable a particular website and its content are and decide whether or not they will include the listing for their readership. You should definitely submit your site to the appropriate directories, being very careful to submitting it for the correct category or subcategory and to following all the rules and guidelines to be sure your website gets the best possible chance of being included. Again, listings in directories generate valuable, high quality one-way backlinks that are beneficial to your search engine ratings and will draw traffic to your website.

 

7. Get Involved With Social Media Sites. If you don't already have an account or a business page on the social media sites that are all the rage these days-like MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and DeviantArt, you definitely need to set one up. Don't start so many that you can't keep up with them, though. Maintaining an active involvement on these pages and current content is key to achieving success and garnering backlinks from "fans" of your pages here. Also, be sure to keep your pages and comments professional. Your image is on the line here.

 

If you follow these seven how-to's, you will soon have lots of one-way backlinks enticing visitors to come and view your website. And these backlinks will also help improve your rankings in the search engines. So why not get started today? It's easy to do.

 

 

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