How You Can Create Backlinks for Your Client’s Website
Tech and Trends:- If you are about to start a freelancing career doing SEO jobs, then this is the most important thing you should consider. Creating backlinks. In most cases, it means that you send a request to a website owner in order to publish the link of your client’s website. There are various methods to do this. In this part we show the most popular ways to create backlinks for a website. Of course, these are not the only ways to create backlinks for a website, but for sure, these are the most popular ones. Each of these link-building method will be analyzed separately in following chapters of this e-book.
- Web Directory Submissions
- Article Directory Submissions
- Social Bookmarking
- Social Networking
- Blog Commenting (.edu – .gov backlinks)
- Wiki Backlinks
- Press Release Submissions
- Web 2.0 Properties (Squidoo – Hubpages)
- Forum Posting
Basic SEO Terms
So, for SEO, it’s very important to create many backlinks in high quality websites. Backlinks are not only a matter of quantity but also a matter of quality. Every webmaster needs many backlinks being built manually in high quality websites. In fact, through the backlink process, we need to show Google that this specific website (that we want to SEO) is popular and that is why so many links appear for this website in many other high quality websites.
A quality backlink process is required in order to give the expected results to a website. There are some factors that can be analyzed to see if a website is considered as a high quality one by Google. The most important factor you need to consider while creating backlinks for a website is Google Page Rank.
Google Page Rank
Even if Google uses more than 200 different signals to rank a page among the search results, one of them remains important and it is best-known as Google Page Rank.
Google Page Rank or Google PR is an index provided by Google that shows how popular a website is according to Google. The value of PR depends on factors like the number of the backlinks, the Google PR of the websites where the backlinks of this website are etc. It is a result of an algorithm. Minimum PR is zero (0) and maximum is ten (10). When a website is just created, it has PR 0, then after adding content to the website, having done all SEO on-site and SEO off- site actions, PR goes from zero to one or to two etc. Google updates the PR value every 3 or 4 months.
When creating backlinks for your client’s website, it’s highly recommended to try to create them to websites that have high PR. Since the backlinks of a website having high PR, are considered to have a better impact on the SEO of the website you want to rank high.
To sum up, Page Rank is mainly a reputation index by Google. More explanations about how page rank works can be found from the Official Google Webmaster Help channel in Youtube. Watch carefully this video to also see, how Page Rank Updates work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Jup5R1MGY
Page Rank value can be different for each page of the same website. For example,
http://www.buildwebsiteguide.com has Page Rank 2 but http://www.buildwebsiteguide.com/contact (another page in the same website) has Page Rank
1. Of course, during the backlinking process you are highly suggested to create backlinks for your client’s website to web pages where the Page Rank is high.
If you want to know the Google Page Rank of each website (or each page of a website), you can visit http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php Simply put the url of the web page you want to check and you will get the current Page Rank value.
Alternatively, since you are about to take this business seriously, it’s highly recommended to install an extension in your Firefox Browser that will let you know the Page Rank of the page instantly when you visit a specific web page.
Simply visit this page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/seo-status-pagerankalexatoolb/?src=search and install addon: SEO Status PageRank/Alexa Toolbar
As you can see in the screenshot above, you simply click “Add to Firefox” button, then “restart now” Firefox and you are done. The result is shown in the next screenshot:
As you see in the screenshot above, each time you visit a webpage, you can mouseover to the PageRank area on the top of the page and you will see the current Page Rank of the site you are visiting.
Other important SEO terms
Nofollow or Dofollow
Another characteristic of a backlink is the attribute of ‘nofollow; or ‘dofollow’. So what exactly is the difference between a ‘nofollow’ and a ‘dofollow’ backlink? A do-follow backlink means that this backlink is “followed” by search engines and it contributes to the Google Page Rank of a page. On the other hand, a no-follow backlink doesn’t offer anything valuable directly to the SEO of a website since search engines skip this backlink when evaluating a webpage. So, let’s see an example:
Example of an anchor text with a dofollow tag
The image above comes from http://www.ezinearticles.com. This is an article directory website where you can create an account and publish your articles there with a hyperlink inside. In the above case, the phrase ‘how to create a website’ is called anchor text and when you click it, you are redirected to the website http://www.buildwebsiteguide.com (this is called a hyperlink) So, we need to find if this backlink is dofollow or nofollow. Check out the next screenshot:
When you select the place where the hyperlink is, you can right click and select “View Selection Source” (This applies to Firefox Browser). After clicking it you will be redirected to a screen where you will be able to see the code behind this hyperlink. In this case the html code that will be displayed is this
“<p>For tips and advice on <a target=”_new” rel=”nofollow”href=”http://www.buildwebsiteguide.com/”>how to create a website</a> you can visit….”
As you can see, even if you may not know html code, you can understand that this link is nofollow. This is indicated by the rel=”nofollow” that you see before the link (…href=http://www.buildwebsiteguide.com/>). This link doesn’t contribute to the Google
Page Rank of this page, since this code tells search engines not to take this link into account when evaluating a website. This code is created by the website owner – in this case from the administrators of Ezinearticles. If you do the same process to other websites (select the area with the hyperlink à right click to this area àView Selection Source) you may see a code like this
“<p>For tips and advice on <a target=”_new”href=”http://www.buildwebsiteguide.com/”>how to create a website</a> you can visit….”
In this case, by default, since there is not a “nofollow” indication, this link is dofollow, that means that search engines count this link when evaluating a page and this backlink contributes to the page rank of the website that we do SEO for. A dofollow backlink serves as a popularity signal and proves to search engines that a website is popular in the web.
Of course, you don’t need to do this every time you are about to create a backlink for your client’s website. You will see later that there are some specific sources that will provide you this information. Here, we just want to clarify what the difference is between nofollow and dofollow backlinks.
As an SEO Freelancer, you should know that most people who have some SEO knowledge do care about having lots of dofollow links to their websites since these backlinks contribute to the Search Engine Optimization of a website. A dofollow backlink can increase the Page Rank of your client’s website and show Google that this website is popular. This is why many clients ask only for dofollow backlinks.
- These backlinks increase the Page Rank of the your client’s web page
- These backlinks show Google that this page is popular
These result to an increase in rankings for your client’s website.
No-follow backlinks do help SEO?
However, having nofollow links can also be just as important since websites that offer nofollow links receive a large amount of traffic and this may result to a traffic increase for your client’s website. As a result, if your client’s website has original and useful content, then this traffic may bring new dofollow links created naturally from the visitors that visited the website by clicking a “nofollow” link. This is why both types of links are important for a website owner. That’s why many internet marketers believe that having dofollow backlinks may not contribute directly to the reputation of a page, but can definitely contribute indirectly to the same purpose.
For example, all links in Wikipedia are nofollow but Wikipedia receives huge traffic every day. That means that when a website has a backlink in Wikipedia, it may receive traffic from there. Then, these visitors may find this website quite interesting and “share” it through Facebook or create a link to it in a forum or create a blog comment and these backlinks may be do-follow ones. In this case a no-follow backink from a high traffic source can result to do-follow backlinks created naturally from the website visitors that came from a no-follow link.
Here, it must be mentioned that many websites offer only nofollow backlinks since if their backlinks were dofollow they could be spammed by thousands of people who want to create backlinks just for search engine optimization purposes and not to contribute to the website content. For example, all external links in wikipedia.org are “nofollow”. This is a fact because if they were dofollow, wikipedia would be spammed everyday with backlinks that would not contribute something valuable to the educational purposes of Wikipedia.
Most high Page Rank websites hardly accept links to other websites inside them.
However, when they accept them, there is a high editorial review previous to that. For example backlinks from CNN, New York Times etc are considered as really valuable links since not only do these websites have high Page Rank, but there is also some editorial process before these links are to be accepted
You can read more about nofollow and dofollow backlinks inside this post from the official
Google site: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
