The Question of Backlinks and Traffic - What's the Big Deal?

Today if we wish our website to be successful, we need to deal with niche markets, search engine optimization, unique content and huge competition. And that list is just the beginning. We will quite possibly have to study marketing and copywriting and how to turn our visitors into buyers. However, for virtually every webmaster, the greatest difficulty is getting traffic.

And that leads us to the topic of this article. How do I go about attracting Internet surfers to my website? One of the answers to that question is backlinks! So, just what do we mean by backlinks and exactly what do backlinks have to do with attracting visitors to my website?

The first thing to realize is that there are two basic types of traffic, paid traffic and organic traffic. Paid traffic includes such things as advertising through pay per click networks, banners on other peoples' websites and any other way in which you can pay to attract a web surfer's attention and tempt him to visit your website. If you are only focusing on paid traffic then you do not have to worry too much about backlinks.

Organic traffic comes when somebody performs a search on a search engine for a topic that they're interested in. Then when all the free listings are displayed the surfer clicks on one of the website listings to visit the appropriate webpage. In the case of organic traffic the webmaster doesn't have to pay directly for the link that the visitor clicks on.

Often, organic traffic is said to be free traffic. Though it can be, it generally is not exactly free. The webmaster will have to do quite a lot of work in order to be listed on the first couple of pages of search engine results. This brings us back to backlinks.

Normally, it is the number and quality of backlinks attached to a website which determines sites that come up after we perform a search. A backlink is simply nothing more than a hyperlink from one website to another website. So it helps greatly if you have a whole lot of websites linking to your website if you wish to have your pages ranked well in the organic search engine results.

But do not forget that quality matters as well. A backlink can be viewed as offering high quality if:

* The topic on the website where the backlink originates is related to the topic on your website.

* The words that make up the hyperlink (referred to as the 'anchor' text) are very relevant to the topic of the web page that the link is leading to. (You ought not to use "click here"!)

* The page rank of the website linking to you is relatively high (preferably a PR3 or above) and here it is a case of the higher the better.

* The website linking to you has lots of good quality backlinks linking to it.

Of course there are a lot more criteria, but the criteria listed here are the foundations of a good linking policy.

So, exactly how does a webmaster create the necessary quantity of high quality backlinks to his website? There are many ways of doing this and even more software programs that are designed to assist in providing the answer. Naturally, buying the software programs adds some cost to your backlinks.

The only truly free way is to wait for another webmaster to find your website and like it enough to link to you. That's all very well, but can take a while. You can get in touch with other webmasters and ask whether they would like to trade links with you. You provide them with a link from your website and they give you one from their website in return. These are known as reciprocal links and are generally thought to be of uncertain value nowadays.

Another way is to make use of Article Marketing which initially means writing articles about topics that fit with your website. Your articles are then submitted to several article directories and include links of your own choice in the resources box which appears at the bottom of your article. Submitting your website to several website directories is another method that fits into the category of free links.

You may also choose to pay for backlinks. One of the simplest methods is to buy links directly. The Internet marketing discussion boards are an excellent place to find links for sale. You could pay $50 a month or more to put a link on a site with a PR of 5. You'll get a lot of juice out of it, but you will pay for it. Of course the lower the PR is then the lower the cost will be.

No matter which method you choose, getting backlinks is vital to your success in ranking in the search engines. You'll want to acquire hundreds or if you can thousands of them. The important thing is that you get started and build up your links steadily over the coming weeks so that you will enjoy a steady flow of traffic to your website.

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