I am going to write three separate posts about the ‘why’s’, the ‘where’s’ and the ‘how’s’ of backlinks. Today I will start off with the ‘WHY’s’….why do you need backlinks?

I’m sure you have seen and read about all of the backlink services, packages and software tools that are available these days to build an army of backlinks to your websites. These services and tools don’t come cheap either, you can spend a fair chunk of change to use any of them.

But why is that? Why do people charge so much for these service, and why are people willing to spend so much money on them?

Well, backlinks are an essential element to a websites’ success if you want to rely on the free traffic coming from the search engines. If you do your niche and keyword research carefully, you can get a lot, I mean floods of traffic to your websites from the search engines.

So why do you need to have backlinks?

Well, Google and other search engines want to make their search results as accurate as possible. They, like any other businesses are striving to be the best at what they do, and they want to make their search results the most accurate and relevant for all of their users. So when somebody goes to Google and types in “how to make money”, the search engines want to bring back the most relevant content.

The way the search engines view it, is that if you have quality information about a subject, then people are going to want to use that as a source of information and link back to it. So when Google or Yahoo sees a lot of backlinks pointing back to a website, they see that as obviously being a good source of information… that’s why people are linking back to it, so they reward that by moving it further up the rankings for the subject matter and keywords used within the article.

So if that’s the case you should just be able to build thousands of backlinks to your website over night so you beat all of your competitors, right?

Wrong.

Google’s algorithms have become way to complex and clever and will see this sudden surge of backlinks happening in one short burst. Now it is possible for this to happen. If you had an article about a news event or something important that just happened, then you will naturally see a large surge in people linking back to this. But then you need to keep this huge amount of backlinks coming into your site over and over again, it should remain consistent or Google will smell a fish and drop your website like a stone.

The thing to remember when you are building backlinks to your website is to make it look as natural as possible. Try to see it through Google’s eyes. Remember, in Google’s eyes, people will be finding your content and THEY will be linking back to it…not you going out and building your own links back to your own website. So you should always keep this in mind and always try to think as Google would when doing you backlinking campaigns.

Important factors to remember when building backlinks is to start it off fairly slowly and gradually build up the amount of links pointing back to your website. Plus you must always vary the source of your backlinks.

What do I mean by this?

Well, would it look natural in Google’s eyes if you built all of your backlinks from article directories only?

Would it look natural in Google’s eyes if you built all of your backlinks from forums?

I hope you answered “No” to both. It wouldn’t look natural at all, and would raise an instant red flag to your site.

So they idea is to get links from all of these sources, article directories, blogs, forums, web 2.0 properties, high page rank AND low page rank sites…

…that’s what we will go into more in part two in a few days time…there “WHERE’s”…where to get your backlinks from.

I have made a video to show you how you can really optimize your article marketing by building a ton of backlinks to either your websites or other articles using an article submission software product called ArticleBot

Article Marketing is still a very effective strategy and is widely used by most of the top Internet Marketers to drive traffic and build backlinks to their websites.

By submitting your article to many different article directories, and linking back to your website, or even another article in your resource box you are going to build a lot of quality backlinks. This in turn will help improve your search engine rankings for either your website or your main article.

To manually submit articles to hundreds of different article directories would take forever, it just isn’t practical. You could outsource the job, but that will cost you a lot of money. The best way to do this is to use a software tool.

I regularly use one called ArticleBot. It is not as fancy as some of top ones, but I personally think it is one of the best available because of it’s ease of use and reliability and also the results it can produce. It is a VERY effective piece of software, and another great part is the price, coming in at just under $25.

I always use Ezine Articles as my main article directory. They are the best out there by a long way, and I also find that once your article gets published it more often than not gets indexed and ranked very quickly. They also respond well to backlinking, and I still have many articles that are sitting in position 1 in Google for their chosen keyword, after using this strategy of building backlinks to them by using ArticleBot.

Ezine Articles don’t allow you to use affiliate links withing your article or resource box. So if you wanted to link directly to an affiliate product you can do this by buying a domain name and redirecting it. You only need to buy a .info domain name for this, they cost $0.99 a year at GoDaddy.com. I made a video a while back that shows you how to do this redirect, you can watch the video here.

When you use a piece of article submission software then it is always a good idea to spin your article so you are not posting the same content to hundreds of different directories. Google will see this when they are published and you will lose rankings for you article because of this. There are many different article spinners available, but make sure you don’t just go for the cheapest option as they can produce some really poorly spun articles that don’t make much sense when you read them after they have been spun. One I use now is called the Best Spinner, and it does a great job.

To make your backlinks in your resource box, you want to use a simple piece of HTML code that will allow you to use your main keyword phrase as your anchor text. This basically wraps your URL up so that it can’t be seen and will show your main keyword as the anchor text, so that when somebody clicks on it they will go to your website or article.

I will give you a sample of the HTML code to use so you can put it in your resource boxes:

<a href=”http://www.YourWebsiteOrArticleHere.com”>The best website</a>

So what you would need to do is replace the http://www.YourWebsiteOrArticleHere.com with your own full URL to either your website or article. Make sure you place it between the ” “.

Where you see the words in the example above, The best website, this will be your anchor text (the words that will be shown and people can click on). You want to try and make these your main keyword phrase.

 This is a very powerful and effective technique for building quality backlinks to your websites and articles. You do need to use an article submission software tool, and I would highly recommend using ArticleBot as it is a great piece of software, easy to use and it costs just under $25.

To have a look at ArticleBot click here