What Are Backlinks and Why Do I Need Them?

This is a guest post by the brilliant Susanne Myers. She is an expert in several areas, including this one. She has graciously agreed to write a few posts on this topic so that you can benefit from her knowledge and experience.

Could you use more traffic to your website? And how would you like it if that traffic was very targeted and FREE? I’m guessing your answers are “yes” and “a lot” or something like it. If so, then that’s exactly why you need backlinks. Let me explain…
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are all the various links that are pointing to the pages on your website. Some of them will be coming from your own site, when you link from your home page to a particular article or blog post for example. Others will be coming from other sites across the web.
For example, I now have a link to my Easy Link Love site from Connie’s blog as a result of writing this blog post for you. When I publish an article on Ezinearticles.com, that’s another backlink for me.
To find out what sites are linking to you right now, Google “yahoo site explorer” (wow, that just sounded wrong …. moving on), enter your homepage url and then click on the yellow explore url button. This is what you’ll see:
<img src=”http://www.easylinklove.com/yahoolinks.jpg” />
“Inlinks” is yahoo’s term for your backlinks. By the way, in the default setting it includes both links from your own site and others across the web.
Anchor Text Explained…
Another important concept I need you to understand is anchor text. That’s the words you are using to link to another page. Let’s look at two different examples.
If I wanted to invite you to take a look at my affiliate marketing blog, I could create a link like this <a href=”http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com”>Click Here</a>. In this case “Click Here” is my anchor text…which by the way wouldn’t be very smart.
Let’s use a better example of anchor text. Instead I could say something like this…
And now I would like to invite you to take a look at my <a href=”http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com”> affiliate marketing blog</a> where I share tips and strategies that will help you get started with affiliate marketing.
In this second example “affiliate marketing blog” is my anchor text, which is a much better choice than “Click Here”. The reason why is that the anchor text is used by the big search engines to determine what the page the link is pointing to is about. Since my blog is about affiliate marketing, using this anchor text in my backlinks will help me rank for the keyword “affiliate marketing blog”, where the first example, would have helped me rank for the term “click here” which doesn’t really help me get targeted traffic, which brings us to our next point.
Benefits Of Building Links…
We already touched on this at the beginning of this post, but let’s talk a little about why you would want to build backlinks and in particular backlinks that contain your keyword in the anchor text.
The big reason to build links is to get more traffic and you will end up getting more traffic in two different ways. The first one is direct traffic from the page that’s linking to you. If you have done some article marketing, I’m sure you are seeing a nice little stream of traffic from directories like Ezinearticles.com. If you’ve ever posted a good comment on a high traffic blog (like Connie’s blog right here), I’m sure you are seeing the same thing. That’s the first way to get traffic, but it doesn’t stop there.
Building links, when done correctly and with the right anchor text, will also help you rank for keywords in the search engines. Often it takes just a few well placed links along with some simple “On-Page” SEO to rank on page one of Google for a long-tail keyword that can easily bring you 20 or 30 visitors a day. Just imagine if you could write a blog post 3 days a week and then spend 20 minutes or so to build a few links and get that traffic. By doing this consistently you can build quite a bit of traffic to your site.
In a few days I’ll be back to talk to you about how you can build some links to your site quickly, in just a few minutes per day.
In the meantime I would like to invite you to take a look at my <a href=”http://budurl.com/easylinklove”>link building program for beginners</a>. It’s a 13 week course that walks you through finding good keywords, optimizing your site and then building links through various methods that will help you rank well and get more traffic to your site.
Susanne Myers
http://budurl.com/easylinklove
P.S. If you’d like to read more of what I have to share about link building, affiliate marketing and such, take a look at my <a href=”http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com”>affiliate marketing blog</a>