How To Increase Your Search Engine Rankings By Building Backlinks

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 is based on building backlinks to your site.

Get backlinks, and lots of them, should be an ongoing part of your SEO. The more backlinks the better, but you want to grow your backlinks naturally. 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. Your website can be penalized by the search engines if they notice it acquired a lot of backlinks in an unnatural way.

There are many ways to get backlinks. You can get to know with other website owners to get traditional reciprocal links from other related sites. Participate in forums related to your website 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. These are just a few ideas to get you started. There are many web 2.0 properties and social networks to use in your link building campaign.

Now that you know where to get backlinks, it’s important that you choose good anchor text for your backlinks when you can. The anchor text is the text that turns into the hyperlink (it’s often blue, sometimes underlined). This text helps the search engines determine what your website, or webpage 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. Variations are important because it will appear more natural, but make sure you also still keeping it relevant.. 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.

Sometimes it is not an option for you to specify 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. Keep applying these techniques until it becomes second nature and you will see an improvement in both your search engine rankings and an boost in the traffic to your site.