Backlinks and Google Information
Because backlinks boost a web page's level of authority - and authority is a key search engine ranking factor - it is absolutely essential that any web page you are trying to promote has a lot of high-quality backlinks pointing to it in order to achieve high search engine rankings.

Backlinks and onsite SEO go together like a lock and a key. Without backlinks your websites and specific pages may not be found by the search engines or may not be deemed important enough to rank high enough for anyone to find them. The fact of the matter is, if you want to rank high in the search engines you are going to need to get high quality backlinks.

One thing that I have found to be true this year is that 100 quality backlinks can take you a lot farther than 1,000 low quality backlinks that may never get indexed. It's not enough to just get the backlinks, you need to get them crawled, indexed, and even cached in order for them to do you any good. There are a lot of services out there that will build you thousands and thousands of links quickly but the problem is that most won't do anything to get them indexed for you. If you're left with thousands of deserted links that search engines don't know about then you won't get much benefit from that.


Popular Sources of Easy-to-Get Backlinks

While they're on their way to being discovered for their great content, many website owners embark upon campaigns to proactively build backlinks by targeting websites that permit (and even encourage) the creation of backlinks.

Following are some of the most commonly targeted backlink sources:

• Backlink swapping


• Website directories


• Article directories


• Blogs


• Forums and bulletin boards


• Social bookmarking sites

While the quality of backlinks obtained from the above-noted sources varies greatly, they can help to accelerate your progress towards greater visibility in the search results, more natural search traffic, natural backlinks, and increased authority, which, in turn, leads to even greater visibility, more traffic, more natural backlinks, and more authority. On and on it goes.

Your Competition as a Source of Backlinks

Another great and often overlooked source of powerful backlinks is your competition - specifically, competing web pages that rank at or near the top of the search results for the same keywords you're targeting.

After all, they attained their high search engine rankings due, in large part, to their authority - and since authority is mostly a function of backlinks, it's theoretically possible for you to achieve the same level of authority simply by embarking on a backlink-building campaign that targets the same backlinks they have. Very simply, if you could get all of the web pages that have backlinks on them to a competitor's web page to add backlinks to one of your web pages - all other things being equal - that page would be equal to the competitor's web page in terms of authority.

In fact, it's theoretically possible to surpass the authority of any top-ranking individual web page by targeting all of the backlinks of the top two, three, or four search results - rather than only the backlinks of the top search result.

Finding Backlink Data on the Competition

To find backlink data on any web page, simply visit Yahoo's Site Explorer, enter the URL of a page whose backlinks you want to identify, and click on the "Explore URL" button. You will be served up with a list of the backlinks point to the page you specified (note: you can harvest backlink data on Google and other search engines, but Yahoo will report up to 1,000 backlinks - which is more than any other search engine).

If you want to dive a little deeper in your backlink analysis - by reviewing backlink quality factors - consider installing SEOQuake's free extension for Firefox and Chrome. In addition to providing you with a list of backlinks (it uses Yahoo Site Explorer for this), it will also report on a number of different factors that affect backlink quality, such as PageRank of the page and the domain, "Nofollow/Dofollow" status of the backlinks on the page, domain age, and so forth.

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