When you talk to many so-called Search Engine Optimization experts they will talk endlessly about the importance that “on-page” elements have to your place on the SERPS. The reasons for this are that most SEO “experts” aren’t that great at what they do, on-page Seo is easy, and it doesn’t take up too much time. Because of this it can be a nice little earner from a client that doesn’t know any better.

What really matters in the battle for good search engine rankings is off page optimization. After all, good on-page work only tells Google that you can optimize a web page. But get a barrow load of sites from all over the Internet pointing to your domain and Google is going to really sit up an take notice, believing that the information or service you provide must be of value.

So, to get your website further up the search engine results pages you need to find ways to get backlinks that are of a good quality to your pages. This is definitely something that is easier said than done but it is imperative to your success if your aim is to make money online.

Next post I’m going to talk about the best ways to get backlinks that will make a real difference to your search engine rankings.

How do we go about getting backlinks to our websites?

There are a few ways to get backlinks to your site, the traditional way and the method that is preferred by Google is to build a site that is so awesome that people all over the Internet will love your content so much that they will link to your pages. This technique has the main advantages of being free but it also rocks due to the fact that you don’t have to do the backlink building work yourself. Unfortunately it does rely on you creating a place on the Web that’s so good that links to it appear by magic and this is an extremely difficult, time-consuming task.

Option number two in the backlinking toolbox is to get out there and beg, steal and borrow links from wherever you see the opportunity. The most popular and successful ways to do this are as follows:

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a very simple way to get some links which only costs a little of your time. Sign up for an account with an article publication site such as Ezine Articles and they will allow you to publish a short article on your chosen subject with a couple of links back to your own site.

Set up some free blogs

There are a huge number of sites out there who will give your own free space on the Internet where you can publish your own content. Publish a blog with a few short articles on it, get it indexed by Google and you can use it to get free links back to your money sites. The best place to get started with this method is at Blogger.com which is Google’s own free blogging platform.

Create Hubpages

Hubpages.com is another place where you can publish your own content and get backlinks to your sites. With their easy to use system you can quickly get content up on their server and use it to build links. Hubpages has an advantage over other options such as blogger blogs and squidoo due to the fact that they are held in high regard by Google, at least for now. Because of this, links from the hubpages domain can be a real powerful force in improving your own domains in the eyes of Google.

Link Exchanges

Creating loads of original content to fill up blogger blogs, hubpages and article directories can be a tough job so it can help to have other weapons in your arsenal which aren’t so draining. One way to get great links from quality sites is to email fellow bloggers in your niches and ask if they would be willing to place a link to your site in exchange for one to theirs.

Buying links

This is a big one that pretty much everyone in the super competitive niches such as loans and credit cards seems to use. Google have serious problems with this one for obvious reasons. If you buy a link you’re basically faking your popularity and manipulating the search engine results. Its not something I have ever done due to the fact that I don’t know enough about it, but I’d advise anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing to stay well clear. Get caught doing this and your site is in danger of getting deindexed from Google.

If your sites aren’t ranking as well as you would like then you are going to have to work on getting more backlinks. Its not a glamorous job and quite frankly its a pain in the arse much of the time but building links will make a world of difference to the amount of traffic you get.

There are a few other ways to get links that make things a bit easier but I’ll go into them more in a future post.