by A W Drake

Created on: August 03, 2010

For anyone who creates online content such as web pages, blog entries or submits articles to directories, getting traffic to that content is essential. One of the cornerstones for generating readership is ensuring your content is well placed in search engines, and this is largely achieved through creating quality backlinks.

The concept of getting a web page well placed in search engines is part of good SEO practice (or search engine optimization). To someone new to the field this may seem complicated, particularly if you read articles by SEO professionals, but for the average content creator there are just a few basics that need to be kept in mind.

Once you are sure you have created engaging web page content, the next point of focus should be to start creating those quality backlinks. Search engines such as Google judge the importance and relevance  of a web page partly by how many backlinks it has, so the more backlinks, the higher the placement is likely to be in search engine rankings.

The first place many people will begin to start creating backlinks is social bookmarking sites. These  can vary considerably but their function is essentially to allow users to submit backlinks. When using social bookmarking sites it is important to realize that some discourage submitting web pages created by the user, and with any social bookmarking site your own bookmark submissions need to include plenty of  other people's web pages. Using social bookmarking sites just to submit your own content may be considered spamming get you banned.

Another consideration for social bookmarking sites is whether or not they provide dofollow links, as opposed to nofollow. A nofollow link is one that search engines such as Google ignore, so they will not count towards the total count of backlinks to your web page. This is not to say social bookmarking sites are not useful since some search engines do not distinguish between nofollow and dofollow links. Also, social bookmarking sites can be another place where your content can be found by others.

Creating quality backlinks can also be achieved by contacting the owners of  websites that share your particular niche, and arranging to swap links. This can be beneficial to everyone concerned because each site lends authority to each other, and of course builds up those important backlinks in the process. It is not a good idea however to ask for links from sites that have no relevance to your web page because this will be taken into account when search engine bots trawl your site. It is after all quality links you are trying to build.

The best kind of websites to try to create backlinks from is high raking sites, such as academic websites and those that have a '.org' address. However, these kind of  sites are not going to allow backlinks from just any web page so the content has to be high quality and of value to the site itself.  In fact if you contact the administrators of such a website it is very unlikely they will allow a link to your web page. In fact the most likely way to get backlinks from high ranking sites is if they find your content and choose to link to it.

However, this leads to an important point about ensuring the quality of your own output, because if the quality is high others will want to naturally link to it without you needing to ask. If you regularly check the backlinks to your web pages you may on occasions be surprised who has linked to them.

Backlinks are an essential part of ensuring your web pages are listed prominently by search engines, and traffic finds its way to your content. However, those backlinks need to lead to quality pages or that traffic will soon dwindle away.

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