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1.    What are backlinks?

2.    Where do I backlink?

3.    How do I backlink effectively?

4.    Can I or Should I outsource my backlinking processes?

(If you click the links it will take you to a page that explains what the text means or what I'm talking about)

What are backlinks?

1.   Backlinks are pretty much what they sound like; they are links on other sites that lead/point back to a page on your own website. For instance on some blogs you are allowed to leave comments and they allow you to insert links into your comment using the sites BBC code or by using the appropriate HTML tags.

In some cases there is a spot where you can input your websites address when you fill out your name and email address to leave a comment in which case whatever name you use will be the “keyword” that links back to your site.

Where do I backlink?

2.   I’ve already mentioned blogs and how to utilize a blog to link back to your site but you can also use forums; in some forums you can include an HTML or BBC code link in your signature and if you aren’t spamming the forum you can sometimes get away with linking back to your website in your own thread or when you reply to another thread on the forum.

This can only be done when you are providing assistance to someone and the forum allows users to link to other websites. You can get around a lot of these rules and problems if you join forums and blogs that relate VERY closely to your own website.

For instance going to a knitting website when you own a blog on monster trucks isn’t going to be helpful unless you have a video on your monster truck site that shows the drivers wife in the passenger seat knitting while he crushes cars, then you might get away with it.

How do I backlink effectively? 

3.   This is where it all starts to come together; first of all you want to backlink on heavily trafficked sites and websites that have a very high Google Page Rank. There are a few ways you can determine this, there are toolbars for all sorts of browsers (mainly the Google Toolbar) which will tell you what the Page Rank is for a particular website.

To find out how much traffic they get you can use a few different tools the first one that comes to mind for me is SEMRush.com, you’ll notice that a lot of sites won’t have any details (you don’t want to backlink on those sites, unless it’s an exact match to the content of your own site) but you won’t rank very well.

To rank well for the keywords you use you’ll want to choose high Page Rank sites and this will help you raise up in the search results. The next thing you want to keep in mind is HOW you link back to your site; you want to use anchor text and anchor text is the “clickable” text you use to link back to your site. In other words you don’t want to just post your link like “http://www.example.com” or even like "http://www.example.com" you want to use anchor text so it’ll look like this “example” and if you did that you would start ranking for the word “example” in the search engines. You can find out more about HTML links here.

I’m not sure if it’s still true or not but you also used to be able to rank for the keywords that are around your link which is why it’s a better idea to use sites that are related to your own site for your backlinking missions.

You also want to avoid spending a lot of time backlinking on a site that doesn’t allow dofollow links because Google won’t assign any Page Rank to your links although if it’s a heavily trafficked site that is very relevant to your site you should still get a lot of traffic from your efforts.

Can I or Should I outsource my backlinking processes?

4.   You can definitely outsource this, but you could end up like many people; paying a company or individual your money to create quality backlinks and end up having them post spam on low PR blogs and forums with questionable material on them and risk having your site delisted.

I would avoid companies guaranteeing thousands of “quality” backlinks to your site and instead I would train a team of writers who share your interests to find sites in your niche and write articles, join blogs and forums and become valuable members of the community providing assistance and quality posts and comments. It’s a better way of building backlinks and it’s also a much better business model because you’re reaching out into your community and doing whatever it is you do best.

So in conclusion I hope this has helped you understand backlinking a little bit better. It took me awhile to understand all of this and I still have a long way to go, it’s all a learning curve but you have to keep in mind the best way to learn is to get right in there and do it.

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