Gaining backlinks is one of the most important parts fto driving visitors to your website. Backlinks are they key to success with search engines. In this article I’ll cover some of the basics of backlinks to help new webmasters understand.

To understand backlinks you just first understand how pagerank works. Google uses a system called pagerank as a huge part of ranking websites in search. Each website is assigned a pagerank, and the pagerank is determined by the quality of the links to a site. Without getting to specific, better backlinks wilkl lead to a higher pagerank for your site, and a higher pagerank will lead to your pages raning higher in search engines like Google. One fact that I would like to point out for pagerank is that it is unique to each page. Pagerank is not assigned to a domain as a whole but to a single page. That page can then distribute the pagerank around the site. (An article about the importance of inbound linking coming soon). You may also hear about dofollow and nofollwo links. The difference between the two is that dofollow links do pass on pagerank to your site while nofollow links don’t.

Now that you know how pagerank works, lets talk about getting backlinks. I won’t make a list of sites which are good for links (those lists are hard to keep updated and always expire). The fastest way to get dofollow backlinks to your site is participating in a forum where your link is in your signature. Make sure the forum has a good pagerank and isn’t a bad site before starting to post there. It’s an extra bonus if the forum you post on is related to your website’s theme. Using a forum to gain backlinks is easy and fast.
You can also gain backlinks by commenting on blogs. In my option, this is slightly less effective ebcause each blog comment has to meet different standards to be approved by the blog administrator and you don’t know if your links will be coming from good sites or bad sites.

Note that while you can link to your site from social networking sites liike Facebook or Twitter to get traffic, these links won’t help you in terms of search engine optimization because they are nofollow. I also wouldn’t recommend social bookmarking sites because they won’t help the backlink part of your search engine optimization.

Some things you need to avoid when gaining backlinks are link farms, link exchanges, and paid links. If Google finds excessiev links to your site from link farms it could actually hurt your site, same with paid links; Google has stated that they do not approve of paid links to pass pagerank and they can have a negative impact on your site. Link exchanges are not as bad as link farms and paid links but they won’t help you. Also avoid triagnle link schemes and linking circles. If it sounds like a way to trick Google, don’t do it.

Lastly, I just want to remind everyone that you will not lose pagerank if you link to other sites. If you find other sites helpful, link to them. It won’t affect your site but it will help the other sites. Thanks for reading.