Backlinks

Welcome back to How To Set Up Your First Blog and Start Making Money as we discuss back-links today!

Many of you probably wonder why you have to create articles to get back-links to your own website. Back-links are what give you your ranking in the Serps (Search Engine Results Page). When someone types in the keywords for your site into Google, what you want is for your website to come up on the page. You'd not only like it to show up, but you'd like it to show up on the first page. Why? It's what traffic sees first and therefore clicks first.

What are back-links? Back links are what brings traffic to your site by way of a different site. I'm sure most of you have seen these on websites you've been to. Mostly you'll notice them within the text while you're reading, probably because the 'words' (preferably your keywords) are a different color and underlined. If you click on this word or set of words, you will be taken to a different site. We want our site to be this 'different site'. If you've followed my steps to setting up your first blog, then you've already written an article and created a back-link to your site.

So why are back-links so important? When Google sees that there are other sites that link to your site, they assume that your site is more important because this means other sites think what you have to offer has value. Now within this method, we find that Google has a way of assigning a value to these links. For example, let's say you have a website like mine, about how to set up a blog and make money and another website about pickles that has a link to your website. How relevant do you think Google will believe your site to be based on that link? Not very much relevance at all because pickles have nothing to do with setting up a blog. The only value that link has is in the fact that an irrelevant back-link is better than no back-link at all.

With that being said, it stands to reason that the more relevant a site is to your site (meaning if I'm talking about 'making money online' and the other site is about 'making money online'), then we have a relevant link to our site. This type of link is so much better and will give you 'strength' in regards to the SERPS (search engine results page). When Google sees links to your page, assuming your back-links have relevance, this helps to increase your page rank. Page rank, the stronger it is, along with other factors, determines your position in the search engines. Once you have optimized your site to get the best position in the SERPS, then you get traffic. Traffic means money. (And I am talking about traffic from the search engines.) The more traffic you get, the more money you will make.

How are you going to make this money? With the introduction of Google's Adsense program, you now have the easiest way in the world to make money and it's absolutely free. Are there other ways? Yes, there are. But the best place to start is with Google Adsense ads. If you've followed my steps to setting up your first blog, you already have adsense in place.

Remember! As you build your page rank, make sure your links pertain to your relevant keywords for which you wish to have authority. You don't want someone linking to your name unless you're using a name that has your keywords in it. Very important, guys!

Let's talk about a few ways to collect back-links. By now, everyone should have accomplished the first way that we've already discussed and that's through article submission. It puts your information out to the web on a high ranking website that will expose more people to the information in your blog. That is, when you have written and posted your article with the appropriate links as instructed, an article reader would be able to click on your link and go straight to your blog and there's your traffic! Aside from linking back to your site, after some time when you've posted enough of these articles, other sites will begin linking back to your page because of the content in your article.

Another factor that seems to play a part in getting your sites ranked higher in the SERPS is whether or not your site is optimized first. Many have studied this and it would seem that often times your site will get ranked higher in the SERPS if you have not optimized your site beforehand. At least they get ranked higher...quicker. Perhaps Google thinks your content is less relevant if it doesn't appear to be a site that has advertisements listed making it seem as though your sole purpose is to make money from other people visiting your site. What does this mean? To me, I find it worth the wait. If I can get traffic to my site first, and then optimize, it's that much sooner that I can begin to bring in substantial income. Personally, I believe that either way you will eventually reach your goals and I'll leave it up to each of you to decide how you want to proceed. At the present time, I'm testing this theory for myself on different sites. One, I optimized as the blog was on-going and the other, I will wait until I can begin to build page rank using my keywords. When I get information that I can share with you, I will put another post here with what I've found. By the way, in case it hasn't occurred to you yet, when you get one of your sites to a higher page rank, be sure to use it to link to some of your sites that have a lower rank. The extra page rank will help raise the lower ranked site. Use caution, however, if you have too many links going out from the higher ranked site, with each link carries less weight. What if you don't have any high ranked sites? Then follow the other methods of link building until you can add this to your list.

Another way to get back-links from other sites is to swap links. Remember, the more connected this site's content is to your own, the better. Swapping links doesn't have as much power as simply having others link to your site, but it's not anything to scoff at either. As time goes on, you will develop the perfect links for your site. If swapping links isn't your cup of tea, then you might try to buy links from other sites. This works in some situations only. Many competitor sites, if their keywords are the same as yours, don't want to risk losing their traffic to your site. Others won't think about that, they'll be more focused on obtaining links.

I don't recommend buying links until you're in a position to do so financially and making money from your blog. As I've already said before, you can make money online without having to spend money!

Another option for increasing your back-links is with blog networks. A blog network is when many bloggers join together and post their own material. Not just one blogger, but everyone who joins the network can be an author. Another way to post links, just like with articles, and create back-links to your own site or exchange links with other bloggers. Use caution, however, on these sites. Build links with the lower ranks sites and well as the higher page rank sites. It probably won't serve you to build a dozen links to high page rank sites all in one day and might set off an alert that your site isn't following the rules. Build your links slowly, the rest will come. As I mentioned when we were writing our article, don't use duplicate content. Write an original article pertaining to your blog focusing on the same keywords. Short articles are fine.

All the ways we've talked aboaut thus far are legitimit and free ways to build your page rank to your site. The one point you need to remember, and I believe I mentioned it before, is that this all takes time. Yeah, it's probably going to take a lot of time and it's going to take a lot of work. I don't say this to discourage anyone, but I do want to paint a realistic picture to the process. This is why many marketers will spend lots and lots of money to get ahead. We'll be discussing some of these techniques in future posts. In the meantime, let's build some back-links and get this show on the road!