Linkbacks- How Important Are They? Part 1

In the world of online business, getting traffic to your site can make or break you. You may have the best product, but if noone ever sees it, you can’t sell it. There is a lot of information out there about how to drive steady traffic to your website. I’ve already mentioned pay-per-click advertising using Overture as one method. The problem with paid advertising is that it doesn’t guarantee you any sales. The other option is to use a service like Commission Junction. I’ll talk more about CJ later, but it basically a way to have other websites drive traffic to your site, while only paying the sites driving traffic your way when you actually make a sale off of one of their leads.

Let’s step aside from all of that for now and talk about getting free traffic from search engines. I’ll start out by explaining a little bit about how a search engine determines who gets to show up at the top when a user does a search. Search engines are constantly “Crawling” through sites on the internet. “Crawling” is just a techi term to describe how search engine software or robots search through sites on the internet collecting data about each site it searches through. As the search engine crawls a site, it records important information about the site in a massive database that houses information about all of the sites it has crawled. Each site in the database is then evaluated based on the collected information and then compared to the other sites in the database. This evaluation and comparison determines what site gets to show up first for any given word (often called a keyword) or groups of words that someone enters into the search engine.

Well, one of the most important factors in determining what site will show up first for a keyword is how many other sites link to a particular site. The search engines essentially treat these incoming links as a vote for the site.

Now, here is where things can get a little more complicated. Not all incoming links are valued the same. To determine how valuable an incoming link is, search engines evaluate the site that the link is coming from. The search engine will determine how many sites are linking to that site. The search engines will also evaluate all of the sites that are linking to it to determine how valuable the links are. All of these links are traced back as far as the search engines are capable of tracing them in order to determine how valuable the links are that point to any given site. 

There are some other very important factors that search engines use to determine what site shows up first, but I’ll discuss them further in another post. Suffice it to say for now, that if you want your site to show up at the top of the search engines and thus capitalize on all of the free traffic that they provide, you have got to get other websites to link to your site. Before you run out and start trying to get links to your online business website, you’ll want to read Part 2. There are some important steps that you will want to take in order to get the very most out of the links to your site.