Everyone loves free traffic to their website. I mean who wouldn’t, right? And everyone knows that the best free traffic you can get is from search engines. So then the question is, how exactly do you get your site to the top of the search engine to get all that free traffic?

Our friends over at Google tell us that “Webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages”.

Getting one site to link to your site is called an inbound link or in the SEO world, a backlink. In general terms, the more links from other sites to yours, the better. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of these links to your website.

So what do you do? Does that mean you should go out there and start trading text links with every website you can find? Of course not. In fact, Google tells us that not all links are equal. To Google quality is more important than quantity. Getting a few links from relevant, authoritative sites can greatly improve your site’s rankings, while dozens or even hundreds of links from other less authoritative sites can do almost nothing for you.

Google tells us that an authoritative site is one with “fresh, revolving content”. This means that the site is always adding new original material and revolving content is simply material that continually gets added and moved around on your site. Now keep in mind that’s the official answer from Google. In reality what the SEO experts have found is that a site with similar content and a high page rank is what you want.

So if you trade links with an adult site that has page rank of 1/10, that one link may not be as valuable as trading links with an adult themed site whose page rank is say 3 out of 10. Page ranks go from 1 to 10.

This site for example has a page rank of 4. The LukeisBack website has a page rank of 5. The website Adult DVD has a page rank of 4. Google’s home page is a PR8. Facebook is a PR10 site. If you aren’t sure you can easily get plugins for your web browser like the SEO toolbar for Firefox to help you find out.

Page rank is updated about twice a year. The more quality, relevant sites that link to you, the higher your page rank goes.

So you would think, oh page rank is what matters for search engine rankings then, no? No. Although it’s easy to make that mistake in thinking that, in reality the same data that determines your page rank (backlinks) helps you get better search engine rankings but one doesn’t have anything to do with the other. That is why a site with a PR1 or heck, even a PR0 site can get decent search engine rankings.

It can get confusing, I know but just keep this in mind. If I want to rank #1 in a search engine for my desired keyword, I need to get people who have a good listing already in that keyword and a good page rank to link from their site to mine.

So with all of that being said, how can you go about building some backlinks to your website?  Well one easy way is to find a blog or two or three that you like and start posting comments or replies to their posts.  Don’t be a spammy ass, just post a relevant reply making sure you link your site name and your page URL when making a reply so you get a backlink when making a comment post.

However I should mention not all blogs are created equal.  If a blog has a “no follow” tag – as most blogs do – comes default in wordpress even, then posting a comment is pointless.  the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.  To know if a blog is using the nofollow tag simply go to the page on their website with a comment already posted, view the page source, and click edit, find “nofollow” and if it is there, move on.  If it is not there, great – you just found a great resource for your website!

If you run a wordpress blog and want to take away the “no follow” tag for your comments then you should look for a plugin like – Wp-Dofollow. It can easily be found in the wordpress plugins directory.