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How to Make Money Online – SEO & Backlinks (A Beginners Introduction to Backlinks in SEO)

The word backlinks is thrown around a lot in the world of SEO, and the truth is backlinks are important. This post will guide you through the basics of Backlinks, which you will need later on to deal with our more complex backlinking techniques.

What is a Backlink?

This question ‘What is a Backlink?’ is one I see all too often, and the answer is very simple indeed.

A backlink is a link from another website to your own website, or page within your website.

That is it!

In Traffic to My Blog we will be guiding you through steps on how to increase website traffic with good backlinking SEO techniques, however it is very important that you understand the fundamentals of backlinks.

Backlinks come in TWO main forms. the usefulness of a backlink to your site is judged by one little bit of code, this code is

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.example.com">Example</a>

The bit of code which makes the difference here is rel=”nofollow”. In normal, or ‘DoFollow’ links, this little bit of extra code does not exist. If a link to your website does contain this bit of code, it is considered ‘NoFollow’

So what is the difference between a DoFollow link and a NoFollow link?

Well to talk about this I need to quickly mention Page Rank, commonly referred to as ‘PR’ When you see the acronym PR it will often be followed by a number between one and ten, for example most of my websites are between PR2 and PR6.

PR is a measure of how much Google ‘values’ your website, so a high quality website may have a PR of eight.

The main factor affecting Google Page Rank is DoFollow backlinks. A No Follow backlink means no page rank increase, which in turn means a much lower chance of your website increasing in Google Search Positions.

A key part of any SEO campaign is a good Do Follow backlinking strategy, of course this also means that most social bookmarking tools are worth much less, since many of them incorporate NoFollow links, which do not benefit your website.

No Follow links still mean that traffic will come to your website, they simply do not pass along any page value, or ‘Link Juice’ as it is known in SEO circles.

Getting high quality DoFollow backlinks can be quite hard, and your best bet is to use an article website such as Hubpages, or a DoFollow Social Bookmarking tool such as She Told Me.

The other minor warning I should give is that reciprocal links (Ie. when you offer to link to a website if they link back to you in return) give a much lower ‘link quality’. While reciprocal links will not adversely affect your website, unless it is spammy reciprocal links, they give much lower benefits than one way unique backlinks.

You can learn more about backlinks on my article The Truth About Backlinks.

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