Days of the web as a mere informational and recreational tool are resting in their graves. Today, the World Wide Web is fast becoming a very efficient marketing tool. The success of a web site largely depends on its traffic. Getting maximum back-links from other websites and using these backlinks to getting listed on search engines like Google are the core mantras of increasing traffic on your website and hence ensuring its success.
Search engine optimization has gained further prominence ever since adwords, adsense and such tools have added revenue generation possibilities to web pages. Earlier, corporates offering some products or services would want to have their website featured in the top search results, but today even blog writers can earn a significant amount if their content is good. They only have to ensure that their article is high on the search rankings.
One of the ways in which search engines like Google determine the relevance of a webpage is by analyzing the backlinks to that page. A link coming into a webpage is seen as an authentication certificate. It is like someone confirming that the site is good. Now, if I ask which is the best football team in the world, the answer coming from a legendary ex-player would be more valuable than one coming from a NASA scientist. Hence, the source of such a link adds weight to this authentication. The following are some means of getting back-links and appearing on search engines like Google.
1 – Social bookmarking: Social bookmarking sites are considered a very valuable source for backlinks. Real people read the content and apply the tags on such sites. It is safe to assume that over a period of time such tagging would be a better way to classify the content than any algorithm based content analysis software. Many social bookmarking sites have come up that allow users to share, store, classify and search the content through tags, categories and other means. Some of the most popular sites are del.icio.us, digg, and reddit. Links from these sites have a very significant effect on the page rank of any webpage or article. Another reason why a higher page rank is achieved by articles popular on social bookmarking is that, search engines such as Google end up ‘crawling’ the articles faster by reaching them through links on these sites.
2 – Getting enlisted in Web directories
3 – Link exchange with other Webmasters
4 – Submitting quality articles to free article directories
5 – Submission of press releases
6 – Getting links from.gov, .org, .edu sites
7 – Getting links from social groups like Orkut, Myspace
8 – Forum posts
9 – Blog comments
10 – Offering free stuff like e-books, information, newsletter subscriptions
11 – Designing templates for blogs
If the content of your article is good and you place it under the right category with relevant tags, it will be read by people who are actively looking for such content. This will lead to an audience that is likely to appreciate the content and spread it to other interested readers. These will lead to further backlinks to your article and an even higher page rank on search engines.