So I’ve been reading lots of blog posts and articles that are talking a lot about backlinks and how they are one of the biggest benefits to your blog since original content.  Original content is definitely still the number one thing you should make sure your site or blog has, but without backlinks nobody will ever read your content!  Backlinks are links from other sites to your own site, either the homepage or articles you have written, and are usually linked by one of the keywords of your site.

To explain this fully we need a simple example.   OK consider your own blog (if you have one) or this blog.  Say I visit a site such as courtneytuttle.com and after posting some comments on his articles he decides to link to this post I am writing now using the keyword ‘backlinks’ then search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, will follow that link from Courts site back to my site and give me a few extra ‘points’.

This in turn will push my site up the Google search rankings just a little higher.  The more quality backlinks my site gets the better my position in Google for the keywords that those links are using and the keywords that I use on my site frequently.  So you can see backlinks are very important, not just for blogs but for any site that wants to rank well for certain keywords.

One thing to remember with backlinks is that 100 low quality backlinks are not worth as much as five high quality backlinks.  That might sound so obvious, however I’m sure that some people that are new to internet marketing are not patient enough to want to wait for those five high quality back links and would rather get as many backlinks as they can no matter how good or bad they might seem.  I’m not saying that having some lower and some medium quality backlinks will hurt your site in any way, however don’t over saturate your site with too many otherwise you’ll definitely be doing more harm then good in the long run!

A good way to ensure that you get good backlinks is to check the pagerank of the pages that you can considering approaching for a backlink and ensuring that they are a minimum of pagerank 4.  Anything lower then this I’d consider medium and lower then 2 I’d consider low.  If your not sure how to check drop me a line and I’ll be happy to forward you some advice!

If you need more information on backlinks or any aspect of internet marketing, please don’t hesitate to leave a message in the comments section and I’ll get back to you, pinky promise!

Scott