This week on Blog Chalk Talk, we're discussing backlinks. Today Easton Ellsworth explains why backlinks are important and how to find out how many your blog has.
Backlinks, linkbacks, inbound links, inlinks ... they're all the same thing.
All these terms refer to online hyperlinks (links) that point to your blog's homepage or one of its articles.
Why are backlinks important?
Links to your blog are precious for search engine optimization (SEO) and human readers.
Links to your blog are precious for search engine optimization (SEO) and human readers.
Search engine optimization
Search engines (particularly our old pal Google) love links. They use them to decide how important your website is.
Generally speaking, the more links you have pointing at your site, the better. It especially helps to have backlinks from a variety of high-authority sites.
Of course, people know this and are constantly trying to cheat the system to get better search engine rankings.
So the search engines are always making their algorithms more complicated to thwart the spammers. But links are, and maybe always will be, a critical part of their ranking formulas.
Human readers
People are curious, for the most part. We see a link and we click on it. We want to see where it leads.
The more links to your blog, the more chances that people will visit it.
How many backlinks does your blog have?
Go to Google.com and search for "link:http://www.example.com" (without the quotation marks). For example:
Your mom's blog - 2 backlinks (one from your sister's blog and one from the doughnut shop website's guestbook)
KnowMoreMedia.com - 2,240 backlinks
NYTimes.com - 1,760,000 backlinks
Google.com - 2,730,000 backlinks
No matter what the number is for your blog, you should set a goal to increase it significantly this year.
As you get more backlinks from high-quality websites and blogs, your search engine rankings will improve and your blog will receive more traffic and attention, making you more money in the end.
» Finding Backlinks on Technorati and a Backlink Sleuth Story from BlogChalkTalk
Yesterday Easton offered some insight on why backlinks are important and explained how to find out how many any website has. Today, Kimberlee Morrison shows you another way to find backlinks and shares a success story of sorts.Another way to... [Read More]
Tracked on: May 15, 2008 9:45 AM | Permalink to Trackback