How to obtain backlinks

Want to Rank Higher in Google?  One of the biggest Factors in achieving this is from what are known as backlinks. Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page for example Internet Marketing brings you right into Brick technology's internet marketing page.

Obtaining Backlinks can be a tricky process that takes lots of time and patience.  It is important to seek out Relevant Backlinks to  your website, a relevant backlink is a link from a site that is similar to yours, for example Canal Boat Cruises, should seek out links from other Canal Boating websites, travel and tourism guides, Blackburn local directories, other local businesses.

The reason relevant backlinks are so important is because Google  will actually devalue the ranking power of  the links you obtain from sources it feels are irrelevant, for example, if canal boat cruises get listed in a directory about construction then their website will enjoy an initial boost in the search engines but weeks later it will drop to its previous position.

Now that you understand the type of backlink you want the next step is to go get them?  You may ask where do I start?  The first step in obtaining backlinks is to identify relevant websites, and directories

A trick we  like to use at Brick to find relevant directories is to type into Google the keyword we are looking to rank for and + submit  for example Canal Boat Hire + "submit site" or Canal Boat Hire + “submit url” and so on. This will return a number of directories that Google thinks are associated with your keyword.

Another method of seeking out relevant backlinks is to see what links your competitors have, in order to do this I recommend using Yahoo Site Explorer. What you need to do is type in the URL of the site you wish to explore and it will return all of the backlinks to that website.

It is also a good idea to seek out blogs associated with your business, one way of doing this is to set up Google alerts http://­www.­google.­com/­alerts in Google news for your keyword and brand name. This will send you an email whenever someone mentions your brand name, or keyword,  comment and participate in  their blog and  you will build up  relationships.

Now that you have some websites to start with,  the next step is to submit to these sites,  some websites like directories have  details you can fill in and submit, these can take sometimes up to a year to show a backlink as they are sometimes human edited.  To speed up the process you can sometimes pay the website to feature your site faster, however depending on the value of the link it may or may not be worth the extra investment. 

Another option is to seek out an email address of the owner of the website, this can sometimes be complicated as you have to dig for information, send a nice professional email telling them why you like their site and ask if there is any way to get a link from  them,  this may involve creating a piece of content, writing an article or  linking back to them as well

There are many other tactics you can use to obtain backlinks but these methods will get you started.  

-Good Luck !