Make Money Online - Do You Have a Backlinking Strategy Yet?

People who are new to Internet Marketing (IM) or who have just started working to make money online may not be familiar with "backlinks," a very hot term in SEO (search engine optimization) circles. Understanding backlinks is important because they are critical to gaining high search engine rankings on Google.

Internet marketing uses two major strategies: paid advertising procured through various services, including AdWords or AdBrite, or search engine optimization. SEO uses backlinks in the quest for exceptional placement on keyword search results, with the goal of appearing first or very near the top of any Google search. Thus it is very important to utilize this strategy, either through learning and applying it or finding a reliable server to do this work.

Here is a short explanation: You are probably familiar with hyperlinks, or text that can be clicked on to go to another website. In its simplest form, a backlink is such a hyperlink that brings users back to your own website. These are used to gain traffic to your site, and it is also a mechanism for raising the search engine ranking of your site.

Search engines rank data in different ways. Representing less than a quarter of the search engine market, Bing and Yahoo use factors intrinsic to your site itself. However, Google, a comparative giant in the search engine world, uses backlinks to order and rank its information. Therefore the placement of your website in the Google results of a keyword search is dependent on the backlinks your site has out there.

How does Google use backlinks? Remember that a hyperlink is a bit of text, and you can see that Google can consider that text as part of its search. This is called "anchor text" with respect to the link, and the source of this backlink also holds a certain level of authority or credibility. The combination of the anchor text and the authority of the site with the backlink in it is Google's data for concluding the ranking of your site.

So, suppose you have created an enterprise to make money online, and you would like backlinks to create and build a good search engine ranking. In early internet etiquette, you would have approached webmasters directly, requesting placement of a link at their site and offering to do likewise for them. Nowadays, this is a dangerous strategy. The reason being that if you link to a website which is banned from the search engines, for example, the search engines will view your website negatively. Therefore, it is important that you develop a strategy which enables you to receive one way links without having to link back to a website. Two such strategies are article marketing and social bookmarking. They are both discussed in detail throughout this website.