Why Backlinks Are Important To Your Website

One of the most fun activities in web business, right up there with checking your traffic statistics, is monitoring your backlinks to see which sites are linking to you.

You must keep a close eye on your backlinks for a few reasons -

• To see the calibre (quality) of the sites linking back to your site.
• To see how high a PageRank (PR) these sites have.
• And to view what keywords are used to link back.

Article Marketing For Backlinks

A few months ago I started testing article marketing. Since I write articles for my blog I thought it wouldn't be hard to re-post an article now and then at an article repository/distribution site.

The idea behind this is that people replicate your article on their own site or newsletter on the condition that they include your author biography with a link back to your site (you create your own author byline). If you write a popular article you can create hundreds of backlinks in a short period of time, not to mention increase your profile, as your article is distributed around the web.

Backlinks Are Constantly Changing

It's important to remember that whenever you assess your backlinks you are taking a snapshot in time. The Internet is quick, darn quick. You might experience two seconds in the spotlight when a prominent site links to yours, enjoy a traffic spike and gain a few new subscribers and backlinks. This is great when it happens but it's rare and only the most unique content or the most famous writers will produce this kind of result.

More often your backlink campaigning will bring in links on sites that, just like yours, not many people know about. However you shouldn't be discouraged. If the owners of these sites are, just like you, committed to a long term strategy of producing a great website resource or blog their site will also accumulate backlinks, gain exposure and rise in PageRank, which will in turn benefit your site. In this sense quality sites help each other rise together over time.

In a lot of ways the Internet is also very slow. Information dissemination may occur quickly but by design, search engines will not quickly drive traffic to your site. Steps you take today to improve your site's search engine performance will not necessarily have an impact until months later. Unique content, celebrity status and good networking can bring you quick traffic but if you are like most people you fall into the majority "working class" online and you will have to earn your rewards over time through hard work.

Assessing Your Backlinks

Google only updates PageRank every three months at best and during this time millions of new webpages are born that start off without any PR at all. When assessing your backlinks and you come across a page that appears to have a PR0 that has linked to you remember to check the PR of the home page because the subpage may have been created after the last PageRank update and consequently won't show any numbers on the green PR bar. You can expect once Google updates that the PageRank of the subpage will be one or two points below the main page and in fact once it is indexed by Google, which happens constantly, not every three months, will have SERP results way before it shows any visible PageRank.

When assessing your new backlinks be sure to browse through each site linking to you and check out the following points:

1. How good is the content? - Is it original or all reproduced (you can spot reproduced content from the author bylines everywhere).
2. How much activity is going on in terms of new topics for blogs (monthly, weekly, daily, multiple times a day) or new articles for standard websites. Also check out how much community activity is happening in forums and comments made to blogs.
3. Lookup the backlinks of the site that has just linked to you to get an indication of it's popularity. Make sure you do this in Google, Yahoo! and MSN search if you want a good spread of data.
4. If you are really doing deep research, conduct a history search in the Web Archives (http://web.archive.org)and see how long the site has been online and how it has changed over the years.

You can spend hours checking your backlinks so remember to return to productive work and not spend too much time indulging your ego by seeing who has linked to your site. Backlinks play an important part of a search engine optimization strategy providing one of the best metrics for assessing the results of your hard work.