It’s pretty much a rule, if you want traffic and more important, if you want search engine traffic, you need link backs from other websites. I have yet to see, a website that brings in a fair amount of search engine traffic that does not have linkbacks. I said see, because I’m sure you know better than to believe everything every one says, so I don’t believe anything totally without seeing proof myself.

By far the best type of linkback you can get is a one way linkback. That is a link to your site from another site, without your site linking back to the first site. Did that make sense? It’s one way because it’s comign to your site, but not going out.

It makes sense that search engines love these links. It’s like some one is saying they like your website or found your website to be of value, hence they posted a link. It’s like a vote for your website. Now if you link back, it is probably going to be seen as a exchange. You are linking to them because they linked to you, often called a reciprocal link trade. The intention is not seen as a vote for a site, but as a trade to help gain in the search engines. It still works but not as well as it use to.

The job of a search engine is of course to provide relevant search results to the surfer. If you were a search engine what would you believe to be a better website? One that gets a vote because it’s good (can be perception), or one that just trades links?

How does one go about getting one way links? Most people don’t realize how many ways there are to go about getting links. If you have a blog, just pinging aggeregators like Technorati give you links from their site. Writing articles with a resource box that links back to your site. Posting on forums with a signature that links back to site. You could create accounts with many social networking and bookmarking sites and list your own page(s). It’s free to create a MySpace account were you can post a link to your site. The list is endless.

Of course not everyone way linkback is the same, some are more powerful than others, but I think you get my point.

Just in case your wondering, posting on blogs won’t help you, as most all use a nofollow tag in their comment that stop the search engines from seeing the link to your site, same for trackbacks. Thank the spammers for that one. You might find an old blog that does’nt use the nofollow tag, but I have’nt seen one of those for quite some time.

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No one can dispute, search engines base much of a sites ranking on the given sites linkbacks. If you don’t know what a linkbank is, it is simply a link or hyperlink on another site that is linked or hyperlinked to your site. Clear as mud?

Another website on the Internet puts a link on one of their webpages that  links to one of your webpages.

One thing to remember, every linkback is not the same. It’s really quite simple, the more popular the site, the better quality that linkback will be. It counts for more if you will. The better quality linkbacks you achieve, the more ranking power your pages will have. On the same hand, the higher quality your linkbacks are, the less you may need to rank better in the search engines.

Just a few things to keep in mind when your looking for links.

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