How Do You Get Quality Links?

The best way to get one way backlinks is to have content on your site that people want to link to.

I know that sounds so vague - but really in the long run this will work.

If you have information on your site that is of value - why would people not want to link to you?

Blogging , Social Bookmarking, Social Networking , submitting to directories , even YouTube videos are all great ways you can receive backlinks at no cost but of great value.

Just keep in mind, traditionally Google looks at the following when it comes to backlinks.

1. Where did the link come from? Is it an authoritative site? For example, a .edu or .gov domain
   
2. What type of website did the link come from? Is it the same theme or industry of your site? This will have higher value.
   
3. What is the PR (Page Rank) of the site giving you the link
   
4. What link text is used to link to you - and where that link is placed (is it on the homepage or is it on a page that contains 100 other outbound links?)

If you do receive a link from another site - you want to make sure that the search engines are able to crawl the link.

Some sites purposely block links from being indexed even though they are visible on the page.

How to check to ensure a link being sent to you from another site is crawled

1. Go to the website containing the link to your domain.
   
2. Right click anywhere on the page and click on View Source
   
3. Push 'Ctrl + F' and type in your domain and click on 'Find Next'
   
4. You should now see something like:
   
   (a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/") Your Keyword Phrase (/a)
   
5. If you see the words 'No Follow' in this line - that means search engines will NOT follow the link.

Here is an example of a link that will not be crawled be the search engines.

(a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/" rel="nofollow")Your Keyword Phrase (/a)

How To See What Websites Are Linking To You:

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools (If you are not sure what this is read my older post)
   
2. Go to google and do a search for: link:http://www.yourdomain.com
   
3. Go to yahoo and do a search for: link:http://www.yourdomain.com

Yahoo will show you almost all the domains that are linking to you - wheras Google will only show selected one. However Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to view the complete list as well.

Incoming links are important - and a quick test to see the power of incoming links is by going to Google and doing a search for the term: Click Here

When you search for Click Here in Google, the #1 result that comes up is Adobe Acrobat.

Nowhere does Adobe have the words 'Click Here' in their domain, their title, their description, their content etc yet they are ranking #1 for that term because so many websites have linked to that page with the term Click Here To Download Adobe Reader

Amazing right?

On another note - there was a time that so many people linked to President Bush's website with the term Miserable Failure - that when you did a search for this term in Google, George Bush's website was the #1 result.

OK now that you know this - don't get carried away and get all these websites to link to you with the same phrase. As I mentioned before use variations and make it look natural to the search engines.

Happy linking.

Baltej Gill