If you have gained an insight into the SEO world, you would have come across the word “backlinks” several times. For those new to the SEO industry, you might wonder what backlinks are and how essential they are for the success of websites.

In short, a Backlink indicates a link from another site to your website. These are also known as inbound links and their number indicates the popularity of the website. Backlinks are considered as votes by search engines: more the number of votes (backlinks) your website has, and based on the importance of websites linking back to yours, your site is assigned a trust rank.

Backlinks today are an important part of the SEO process because when you build quality backlinks, your website stands a higher chance of getting indexed faster by the search engines. Also, from the long term perspective, it will help in boosting quality traffic to your site. Apart from this, building backlinks serves your bottom-line of website visibility by improving your page ranking and ultimately your ranking in the search engines.

Additionally, it is not just enough to have lots of backlinks, but, it’s also the quality of backlinks that helps in achieving a better ranking in search engines. When calculating the relevance of a website to a particular keyword, search engines usually take into consideration the number of quality backlinks to that website.

Search engines like Google give a lot of importance to websites that contain more number of quality backlinks and also consider those websites as more relevant when compared to others in search results.

A backlink is considered as a quality link if:

a) It links back to your site with the keyword which you are optimizing for.

b) The website linking back to yours has the same theme as your website – this means that when your website contains an inbound link from another site, and that site has content related to your website, this inbound link will be considered as more relevant to your website. However, if this inbound link comes from a site that is totally unrelated to your site content, then it is considered as a less relevant backlink. Therefore, higher the relevancy of backlinks, the greater will be their quality.

For instance, if you have a website about furniture and you receive an inbound link from another website also containing furniture, then this backlink will be considered more relevant and of higher quality when compared to a backlink from a florist website.

Today, search engines watch out for websites that build quality backlinks slowly over time. Though it is quite easy to maneuver links on webpage’s in order to attain a high ranking, it is much tougher to manipulate search engines with inbound links from other sites. This is also one of the reasons for backlinks gaining increased importance in search engine algorithms. Recently, search engines assessment for quality backlinks has become even tougher as there are many webmasters out there who make use of unethical techniques and deceive search engines to attain a higher ranking. These techniques are not only illegitimate but can also lead to your site getting banned.

Lastly, building quality backlinks could be a very time consuming and tedious process requiring a lot of patience, efforts, and also funds. However, it is a crucial step in creating blogs or any website since the quality and relevancy of backlinks can determine the success or failure of the site. Therefore, it is very important that you prioritize this in your SEO activity and hire professional SEO experts to whom you can outsource this task and achieve a better search engine ranking.

I am stuck, it has been suggested I come here and figure this out. I want to add podcasts of my blogs here, but can’t seem to figure out all the technical jargon and craziness involved with adding a podcast. I don’t seem to be able to see anything within my power or that is obviously visible for me to make this happen.

Post reply First, learn to find, and share, the blog URL directly with your family and friends.

blogging, blogger,blogspot,make money from blog

Next, we have several FAQs, which discuss how to get the search engines indexing your blog.  Indexing by search engines leads to traffic from people searching, which leads to readers, subscribers, and Followers, and to feedback from the readers, subscribers, and Followers.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=14fa23d55246c1c4&hl=en

blogging, blogger,blogspot,make money from blog

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=58ce19749a46c003&hl=en

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=5ea78c91417dbbe8&hl=en

blogging, blogger,blogspot,make money from blog

Having your blog searchable on the web won’t happen automatically, nor will it happen immediately.  A lot of hard work, and patience, is required.

Besides friends and family, your initial readers will come through the “Next Blog” link, randomly.  You get more “Next Blog” traffic from posting more, less from posting less.  And, you’ll need this initial traffic.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/01/more-traffic-to-our-blogs.html

Most long term readers will initially find your blog through search engine hits, from meaningful searches.  Not from searching for your blog by name.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/06/relevance-yields-readership-and-search.html

You have to get the search engines involved, but you won’t get listed by them, automatically.  You have to do some work, let them know that you’re there, that you want to be listed, and that you are worthy of being listed.

1) Get your friends to link to your blog, where your blog is relevant.

2) Participate in forums, where your blog is relevant, and include the URL.

3) Comment on other blogs, in relevant comments, and include the URL.

4) Put relevant and useful content in your blog.

5) Some search engines may index your blog using the site feed.  Be sure to activate the feed.

6) When you have done all of the above, your blog will have some weight.  Submit your blog to the search engines, for indexing.

7) Post frequently, and keep the content of your blog moving.

http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help/web/how-to-get-traffic-and-repeated-readers-for-your-blog

None of this happens overnight.  Search engines can take months to index your blog fully.  And even when indexed, don’t expect for a search to some key element in your blog to give you an entry on the first page of the search hits.  And remember that owners of other blogs, like yours, are actively working to be included by Google too.  Try to ignore the trolls who babble about SEO.

http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help/web/blogging-is-all-about-patience

Use Google Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer, to watch the indexing progress, keep an eye for problems, and know when the blog is indexed.  And to setup a sitemap, which is useful to the search engines.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/05/google-webmaster-tools.html

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2009/03/yahoo-site-explorer.html

Google Analytics, that’s suggested by some helpers here, is more useful to small businesses and corporations.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2006/07/know-your-visitors.html

And understand the differences between followers, readers, and subscribers.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2009/09/know-people-who-view-your-blog.html

Did you find this answer helpful?

Yes

No

Report abuse

Post replyust curious. I did expect after joining blogger to be able to browse through other people’s blogs using blogger, searching by keyword, searching by tags, all the usual stuff that you can do on the other websites I use. However I can’t find any of this stuff. Am I missing something or is this just not how blogger works?