Deep-Sea Backlinking

It’s now very well accepted that getting backlinks, that is, links from other websites, to your website is not only a great way, but also a very necessary way to gain rankings in the search-engines. To do this, you need to promote your website. There are many ways to do this, like article marketing, Pay Per Click marketing, email marketing, press-releases and so on.

However, there are backlinks and there are backlinks. You see, not all links are created equal. The search-engines don’t rank all links the same, and not even all backlinks are rated the same.

For example, getting a link to your site that has anchor-text associated with it saying “click here” is one of the very worst links you can have. It’s probably better not having a link at all if you can only get this type of link.

It’s much better to have anchor-text that includes the name of your website, or at least text referring to something relevant to your sites content.

But of at least equal importance is WHERE the links point. Most people typically have the links pointing directly to their home page (also called the ‘index’ page). This is okay, however the search-engines seem to like seeing links to VARIOUS pages within your site. They see this as being a much more realistic picture of how other websites would link to you.

In effect the search-engines are asking “are these websites linking to something especially relevant to that particular page in this other website, or are these links simply articles or press-releases that have been pumped-out to fool us?”.

It’s a bit like Deep-Sea fishing. Rather than casting your line into a river and letting your line sit on the surface, you make sure the float allows the line to drop WAY down deep into the water. That’s pretty much how you want to view your links. Direct them DEEP into your website.

Not only is this good for getting higher search-engine rankings, you’ll also see improved retention from your readers and website visitors.

Why? Well, it’s quite simple really. When somebody reads something that you have written on somebody else’s website and they LIKE what they read, they will likely click the link and be taken to the same post or article within your website. So, they immediately feel comfortable reading what they’ve already been reading.

The graphics on your site will be new to them, and they may not LIKE them at all, but they are already comfortable on the site; they KNOW this is the site maintained by the person who wrote that great article on the other person’s website.

Now that they are on your site, they already know some of your work, so they’ll feel more inclined to read some of your other work, whether that is your blog-posts or your articles.

So, the more natural the balance of links into your website the better for the search-engines (and therefore your rankings) and the more you can get people directly to the page where the SAME article or post is within your site, the better it is for the reader.

Always remember what you are trying to achieve. You want rankings from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Ask so that you can be more easily found from a search-engine, but you really want PEOPLE to like what you provide in your website. If they like your site, they will get to like YOU, and if they like you, they will BUY from you.