fbpx Skip to main content
eCommercegooglemarketingsearch engine optimisation

Building “back links” for search engine optimisation – for beginners!

All commercial website owners want people to visit their site. Since you’ve gone to the trouble to produce a website, you have probably also made a little effort to learn something about how to get it noticed. In the course of your reading, you will have read about back links, but you may not know exactly what they are. This guide for building back links is intended for people like you.

Once you’ve published your site, you’ll then want to start the process of promoting it using SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You’ll maybe subscribe to newsletters by SEO gurus in hopes of gaining some valuable insights. Like many beginners, some of the best advisers will be useless to you because they use terminology you don’t yet fully understand.

The first and most important thing you will have to do to get your site optimized for search engines will be the creation of back links (or backlinks) and this is where beginners often get lost. Their SEO guru doesn’t tell you what these “back links” are. Instead, he will skip ahead and tell you that you have to write blog posts, join and post comments on forums, make article directory submissions, etc. That include backlinks, but you don’t know what he’s talking about.

Don’t be too annoyed with your guru. You do know what backlinks are. It’s just the terminology that you don’t understand. Backlinks are those underlined links you see all over the web. So yes “backlinks” are basically links from other websites to yours. When you click them on, you are sent to another website.

It’s as simple as that. These links are important in SEO not so much because you’re hoping to get the people who stumble across your links to click them on and go to your site, but because web crawlers (the automated programs search engines use to “crawl” the web for content) take note of them. To the web crawler, those links to your website are an indication that your site has been noticed and commented on. This is turn helps your search engine ranking. Think of the web like a big democracy and links are votes, like in a democracy the person (website) with the most votes (links) will rank the highest.
In very competitive niches, it’s almost impossible these days to have your siterank highly in search engines unless you employ a paid link building service. (Paying people to build these links for you in an ongoing fashion) In smaller niches, however, it can be done by the site owner. For starters, you will have to get links from anywhere you can, the more relevant to your site, the better. So starting with any suppliers, partners, associations etc and then you can also write articles and publish them to as many social media markets as you can find.

You will also need to visit relevant forums and other people’s blogs and post comments that include backlinks to your URL. You have to spread the word if you want to be found. It will be a big job, but it can be done.

Talk to us today for more information about a link building strategy.

Let’s do digital business

What started as the humble world wide web is now an ever expanding universe of channels, platforms & opportunity. We’ll help you focus on what’s important to grow your business online.