Let’s imagine that on-site optimization is preparing ground for growing plants while off-site optimization (backlinks building) is the water supply system necessary for developing strong plants and good harvest. The ground preparation is not enough for good results; you definitely need to provide decent watering to get fruits. In search engine optimization the more inbound links a website has the higher it ranks in search results. Number and quality of backlinks as an evaluation factor had been first introduced by Google and after it proved to be a very proved to be a very effective method to impartially evaluate the website popularity and relevancy it was adopted by other major search engines.

As I have already told in my previous articles, search engines use extremely complex formula (algorithm) to count page rank of a site. They may take into consideration up to 200 (the number is constantly growing) different factors which influence the rank a website has on search engines. Number and quality of links leading to your website from other websites is one of the most important factors which determines whether your website will be found by people searching for your targeted keywords in search engines or not. Websites having inbound links (without the “nofollow” attribute) pointing to your website as if cast votes for your website or a webpage to which the link leads. The more votes you’ve got the more important your website is considered to be in the “eyes” of search engines and the higher rank they will attribute to your web pages. However placing a link pointing to your site on somebody other’s website is not enough because inbound link quality also influences the rank of your webpage. The most popular search engine Google pays a great attention to backlinks quality which depends on the following:

• Title of the page where a link to your website is placed;

Search engines are very smart today and they can determine whether a website or a webpage having a link pointing to your site has something to do with your site’s “theme”. Site and page relevance are rather significant factors for Google. Google probably won’t ban you if you have inbound links from irrelevant websites (because your competitors could place links to such websites to harm your) but those links are considered to be low quality. Google makes all possible to count only those backlinks which have been added to websites by merit but not because you had paid for your link inclusion or exchanged links with other webmasters. Google is said to argue importance of inbound links from the most of directories except some very reputable ones. Some SEO experts say that Google gives a little or no value at all to those links placed on pages with a title containing such words as “links”, “resources”, “directory” etc. as such pages are deliberately created to store links to other websites. Google is getting more content oriented and fights for natural link building process.


• Whether your link has an anchor text or your link is just an ordinary URL;

If it is possible, make sure the link pointing back to your site from other website has relevant anchor text containing your keywords. It is always advisable not to use the same anchor text all the time as it may be deemed as spam by search engines.


• Number of links on the same page where a link to your site is placed;

Any webpage passes so called “link juice” to the pages it links through the links without the “nofollow” attribute. The bigger is the Page Rank of the page linking to your site page the more “link juice” you get. You have to accumulate “link juice” in order to grow your Page Rank. However this link juice is equally distributed between all “dofollow” links on the page. So the more links there are on the page the less “link juice” each link receives.


• Number of links to the page where a backlink to your webpage or domain is placed;

As I already told above, the more back links pointing you your website there are from other websites the more chances your site has to get a decent Page Rank and have a better ranking in search engine result pages for your main keywords. By analogy the more websites are linking to the site linking to yours the higher PR it has and more link juice it passes to your website. Hence we can also talk about importance of the Google’s Page Rank of the page linking to you (at least, it is important for Google which is, no doubt, the main target of any SEO).


• Link age;

A link which stays a long time on a website is deemed to be more important then recent links. By the way, fast inbound link building can be suspicious for Google and it can interpret it as spamming unless the fast link growing is caused by news stories, for example.


• The IP address of websites linking to yours;

Wouldn’t it be unfair if search engines did not take into account IP addresses of websites linking to a certain site in determining this site’s Page Rank? Anyone could create another website then and place thousands of outbound links to any website in order to raise its PR by means of a great number of backlinks pointing to the site. But, luckily, search engines take into account IPs linking to you, that is why it is very important to have backlinks from as many different IP addresses as possible in order to accumulate a good Page Rank.

Google has been trying to convey the message of natural link building for many years and it’s becoming more and more serious about it. This is content of your website which must stimulate people to link back to your website. It is even said that Google depreciates backlinks from the most of directories except a few high reputable ones which submissions are scrupulously reviewed by humans before being accepted. I do not know how much true it is but Google indeed seems to put a great emphasis on the importance of links which are integrated into the content, i.e. not links from pages designed to specially store collections of links to other website but links in the text of articles, blog posts, reviews, press releases and other such content.

So, building inbound links in a natural way is a long-term process, which, nonetheless, can be speeded up by you. You can improve your organic ranking with the major search engines by means of the following backlink building methods:

• Directory submissions

Although Google is said to devaluate links from low PR directories as being unnatural there some very reputable directories loved by Google. If you want to submit your website to a web directory make sure the directory has a high Page Rank (at least 5). The most recommended web directories are Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org (it’s very difficult to get listed in ODP, but it is worth trying. Before submitting a URL, read the rules carefully, take a look at already listed websites in your category to better understand how to make an acceptable description and a title; may be consider trying deeper subcategories), Yahoo directory (this is a paid one, but it’s worth paying if you can afford some $250 per year as the directory has a very high PR and reputation), The WWW Virtual Library at http://vlib.org/ (another very reputable web directory which is said to manually verify and evaluate each submission before listing. You can contact a desired group moderator via e-mail and ask whether your website or blog is good enough to be included). You can find some other less important web directories to submit you site.


• Article marketing

Article marketing is the best way to get natural dofollow backlinks to your site from a reputable website with a high Page Rank. You can write articles related to your business niche and naturally integrate links with the anchor text containing targeted keywords back to your web pages or domain. You can choose a popular article directory to submit your articles to (I personally would recommend EzineArticles) and start writing. Some article directories including EzineArticles allow creating the “About the Author” snippet which goes right after the article and this is where you can place links (no more than 2 for EzineArticles) to your website with the corresponding anchor text.


• Press releases and news

The method is similar to the article marketing with a great possibility to get high quality backlinks. There are a few press release submission sites where you can publish your company press releases containing links to your website.


• Blog and forum posting

Participating in forums related to your business niche and running one or a few blogs can increase dramatically your website Page Rank. A lot of forums allow adding a signature containing dofollow links to your website with the corresponding anchor text. This signature appears after each post created by you on the forum. You can also run a blog where you can write about interesting stuff and news in your business niche, after each post you can write a short paragraph about how your company is related to the business or how those events described in news can influence your company business, and, of course, you can place a natural looking link to your main website in this paragraph. In order to find a forum related to your business you can use such search query in Google “forum allintitle:[your keywords here]” (do not include quotes).


• Leaving blog comments

Leaving relevant non-spammy comments is another link building method. You can try and find blogs which allow dofollow links in the comments and after your comment you may ask the blog owner to visit your website or blog too (of course, if the owner is not your direct competitor) and leave a link to your website or you may just want to use a commenting form to fill in your website URL in the corresponding text field. Even if the blog does not allow dofollow links, the link you left there can potentially bring traffic to your website or blog and someone can be willing to link to your site if you have an interesting content worth being linked to.