Backlinks and Backlinking

Backlinking and building backlinks mean that you link to your site from another website on the Internet. You create a way for both people and search engine spiders to reach your site easily. If you want to get traffic (visitors) you have to build backlinks.

Most of what you need to know about backlinking and getting traffic through backlinks has already been written out by two respected and efficient hubbers. Read their articles to get a good picture of what backlinks are, then return here to find out essential technical information that will ensure you build your backlinks the right way instead of just wasting a lot of your time.

Backlinking Information

Backlinking takes time and effort. You have to create dozens, if not hundreds, of backlinks to get more traffic (visitors) and to increase your search engine ranking. This is a tedious task, so it's important to make sure it's worth your while.

Having read the suggested two articles you might already know where to go to build backlinks. BUT! One very important thing to keep in mind is you have to write your link the right way.

Steps:

1. Note the URL of the page (your page) that you want to link to.
   
   It looks like something like this:
   http://hubpages.com/hub/backlinks-backlinking
   
   
2. Note your most important keywords for your page, ones that are not included in the URL, and write out your link text from them.
   
   For this article, they would probably be:
   getting traffic, getting visitors, increasing search engine ranking.
   
   The link text would be:
   Getting traffic (visitors) and increasing search engine ranking by backlinking
   
   
3. (Optional) In many cases you will have lots of keywords. Including all of them in the visible link would make the link too long. Take these keywords and create a nice short sentence from them for your visitors to read.
   
   For this article, I would write:
   Promoting your site is done by creating inbound or incoming links that lead Internet surfers from other websites to yours.
   
   
4. Now, write this HTML code to create your link:
   <a href=http://YourURL title="YourSentence">YourLinkText</a>
   
   Based on the above choices for URL, link text and summary sentence, my code would look like this:
   <a href=http://hubpages.com/hub/Backlinks-backlinking title="Promoting your site is done by creating inbound or incoming links that lead Internet surfers from other websites to yours.">Getting traffic (visitors) and increasing search engine ranking by backlinking</a>
   
   This would produce a link like this:
   Getting traffic (visitors) and increasing search engine ranking by backlinks

Our primary goal with the URL is to feed our 2 to 3 most important keywords to search engine spiders. If links are like highways, this is our way of telling search engines what they will find at the destination if they follow the link.

Our primary goal with the link text is to tell people what the destination page is about. Our secondary goal here is to feed some more keywords to search engine spiders - the ones that we couldn't include in the link.

The summary sentence is not very important. It gives us some more room to include even more keywords. In most Internet browsers it is displayed when someone hovers their mouse over the link text. The way to include this sentence is using the title attribute of the href element as in <a href=http://hubpages.com title="If you click here, you'll be taken to HubPages home page.">HubPages</a>

Some websites such as HubPages itself make it a bit hard for you to use HTML code snippets. So if you just paste code like this:

<a href=http://hubpages.com/hub/Backlinks-backlinking title="Promoting your site is done by creating inbound or incoming links that lead Internet surfers from other websites to yours.">Getting traffic (visitors) and increasing search engine ranking by backlinking</a>

into your editor, it will not turn into a link. This is when you have to hit the HTML button - the first button in the toolbar, wait for the resulting window to appear, paste the code there and click Update. You'll be returned to the normal window and the result will be a link like this:

Getting traffic (visitors) and increasing search engine ranking by backlinking

Try hovering over it and you'll see the summary sentence too.

Wrong way:

To read Mark Knowles's hub about backlinking click here.

Right way:

Read Darkside's hub about backlinking.

And by the way, if you actually hit any of the above links, you can stay there and start fishing for sites and resources. Backlinks make your hub stronger!