Use Backlinks to Direct Traffic to Your Website & Get Listed Higher on Google

There are a number of factors that search engines such as Google and Yahoo use to determine the position of your website in the search engine results, once of the most important, in my opinion, is backlinks. Backlinks (incoming links to your website) plays a large role in search engine optimization (SEO) because the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking, popularity and importance.

Fact: Google will rank you differently than Yahoo

Google puts more importance on the number of websites that link to your website than any other search engine. If you want your website to be listed high in Google, you must have a large amount of quality links directed to your website. This is called link popularity ( gaining new links from outside websites to your website) and has been proven to be a popular way for businesses seeking to improve their search engine rankings.

Gain backlinks to your website by doing these three things:

1) Write unique web copy
As people discover your website and realize its benefits, the likelihood of them linking to your website naturally increases. For example, if your a photography studio you may want to write tips on how to take good photographs, if you are a long island web design company you may want to write about tips for building a quality website. Remember, the easier you make it on your audience to find good information, the more likely they are to link to it.

2) Directories
It’s very important to receive backlinks from is topic specific or niche directories. These are websites that are dedicated to news and information that is an exact or close match to your services. If you have a website that does slide scanning, then you want to be listed on sites that focus on scanning and photography. In the case where a website doesn’t know about your website, try asking them to link to your home page (9 out of 10 teims you won’t get a reply). However, send a personalized email telling them the benefit or feature their users will get from linking to you.

3) Build Partners
Overlooked for building link popularity is backlinks from partners and vendors for your business. Because you already have a business relationship with these companies or individuals, you are more likely to be able to request and receive a link from their website. These websites help validate your place online and also establish you within a community of websites online.

By hiring a qualified website designer that is knowledgeable of the latest search engine practices and techniques such as building backlinks to your website, you will be on your way to getting your website listed higher in Google.

What do we know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for  websites? What must we (webmasters, business owners, bloggers) do in order to have our website rank high in the pages of Google (let’s face it, nobody is trying to rank for Yahoo, Bing & Ask). Use these SEO tips to gain traffic from people who are actively searching for exactly what you have to offer. There is no mystery or secret code to rank your website high on the pages of Google. I’ll provide the you my SEO tips that I’ve used to rank my clients websites first page of Google. Here we go, my Top 5 SEO Tips for for 2012.

1. Unique, Original Content (and lots of it): Yes, have you heard this before? I thought so, but many sites I visit post the same irrelevant content, so why am I here. Well I won’t be for very long. Out of new blog ideas, Google search “blog topics help” – or try Danny Browns website for topic help here.
2. MetasUltimate SEO Plugin: My absolute favorite SEO plugin for WordPress. This all-in-one tool provides the easiest way to add your title, keywords and description to each page. You can get it here.
3. Your Slug! When you’re writing your article, the ’slug’ fielt is located below the title of the article- this will determine the website address of the article.Imagine I entered ‘Long-Island-Web-Design‘ for the slug, the website address of this article will be http://www.bluebarngraphics.com/long-island-web-design.html. Search engines that see that your website URL’s have the same keywords as your meta description, title, keywords and your content will be seen as being even more consistent.
4. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords! When writing your article, one of the easiest ways to make your article relevant to Google’s bots is to include your main keyword 3-5 times throughout the article. Do not go overboard thinking if 5 is good then 10 is better. This is spamming and you will be penalized for it.
5. Link To Your Very Own Posts: Install the WordPress Related Posts Plugin (get it here) and begin linking to a few similar articles at the bottom of each of your articles. This is both a terrific way to guide your readers to more of your articles on similar topics and it’s a great way to guide search engines around your WordPress website.

Within search engine optimization (SEO), link building is one of the most effective ways to increase traffic and get high ranking results in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Building quality backlinks to your website increases your pagerank and results in more traffic to your website. Backlinking plays an important role to getting visitors to your site, the more links you get to your site, the more quality visitors you’ll get from the search engines throughout your market region and the world. The more links you have to your website or web page, Google will see you as ‘more important’ than your competitor who may have less backlinks, therefore ranking you higher in the listings. Ultimately, you want to build quality backlinks to your blog or website, here’s how:

1 – Unique and Original Content

Unique and original web copy is the best way to get high quality backlinks from other sites. By offering original, quality web copy that provides real value to your audience, people will discover your website and realize its benefits. The likelihood of them linking to your website increases, naturally. For example, if you’re a photography studio you may want to write tips on how to take good photographs, if you’re a web development company you may want to write about tips for building a quality website. Remember, the easier you make it on your audience to find good information, the more likely they are to link to it.

2 – Article directories

Article writing for building traffic and backlinks is a strategy that webmasters has been and still are using – quite effectively. The problem is that some website owners either ignores it or does not trust their writing skills. My favorites are eZineArticles, GoArticles and articlebase.

3 – Blog commenting

Commenting on different blogs is the easiest way to get backlinks, it’s a powerful way to drive traffic to your website. The only thing you need is to find quality blog website that is niche related to your company, read the forums and reply with an insightful tip, article or idea always gets noticed and generate lots of backlinks. Be sure your replies are related to the discussions otherwise it will be like spamming.

4 – Forum Postings

Forums will provide Dofollow link via signatures of signed up users, which means if the forum is a popular one, a backlink can be extremely valuable. If you know the solution to a problem or the answer to a question and you feel your answer could benefit more users, put it on your website and direct the members to look at it at via your web page. In your signature, include the link to your website; with every post you get a backlink to your website.

5 – Post at .gov and .edu forums

Submitting your links on edu links is a great way to boost backlinks, traffic and ranking, especially Google.  Edu and Gov links are the highest quality of links and are recommended by Internet marketers.

6 – Press Releases

It is widely understood that SEO press releases are an excellent source of backlinks and can greatly assist in an overall SEO marketing plan. To get these links, you need to include links within your press release your site. The most popular press releases website is prweb.com, www.w3promtoer.com and www.hypesol.com. Don’t forget to link to your website.

7 – Link Baiting

Make good posts, which will help you create lot of discussion and backlinks. Whether by creating good content on your blog or by offering something unique, you might have already created linkbaits without knowing that you have done so.

8 – Link exchange

It is a strategy used by webmasters where you give a website a link on your website and they give you a backlink to your website. It is not as effective as it was before. For example, if you are intestested in link exchange, you can send me an email to name @ websitedomain.com with the subject “link exchange”.

9 – Hubpages

These are not policed, and they’ll basically allow anything to stay on their site. Don’t forget to link to your website. The  point of using HubPaages is to get links to increase your site’s link juice, and ultimately its rankings.

As web designers, we each have our own techniques for website Search Engine Optimization (SEO) using HTML 4 and XHTML, but what about SEO with HTML 5? HTML5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard, which gives search engines the needed context they need to understand what’s contained in a web page.

How will HTML5 change the way we approach web design with SEO? What are the possible impacts of HTML5 in search engines such as Google? It’s not only important to have a clean, easy to navigate website design for the end user, but also to make this information easy to distinguish for the search engines.

The key component of HTML5 is addition of new elements that help us better identify what’s on a web page, improving page segmentation so that different parts such as the header, footer, navigation, etc, can be easily be distinguished. Eventually, when HTML5 becomes widely adopted, search engines will use these new elements to help find page elements of interest.

<article>

This <article> element may be the most important additions to HTML5 (when it comes to SEO). The <article> tag allows you to indicate the main content of a web page, search engines may put more weight on the content inside the <article> element. Articles inside article tags will have a cleaner code since the <div> tag will not be used as often.

<header>

Elements like h1, h2, h3 up to h6, paragraphs, hard-coded links and any other tags that are important to your work can be held by the new header tag.

<section>

The <section> tag will be used to divide the web page into various sections. With HTML5, each section can now have separate HTML headings. Big SEO advantages here.

<footer>

Usually the footer contains secondary data such as copyright information and your privacy policy. Now this section can be used to help search engines identify this auxiliary information, possible making this data secondary in the engine algorithms. There are many more new tags in HTML 5, once it’s accepted, it will be the markup language for years and will help improve search engines identify your content, therefore improving a correctly SEO enhanced website design stand apart from the rest.

Blue Barn Graphics is a Long Island Web Design company providing website SEO for increased website traffic, site popularity and high search engine ranking for Long Island businesses, as well as the entire USA.