Believe it or not, there are proper and improper ways to use backlinks, and using them in the improper manner are not going to get you the results you want.

If you’re spending your valuable time building backlinks to your website, then it would be in your best interest to learn the proper usage, otherwise that’s a lof of wasted time with nothing to show for.

Please don’t let this happen to you.

The first thing you need to know is that there is a difference between a regular/plain link and an anchor text link.

What Are Anchor Text Links?

Here’s a clear definition I found: “The anchor text, link label or link title is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.”

That pretty much sums up everything I’m going to be talking about. The anchor text is essentially keyword phrases that you want your website to rank for in search engines. Got it?

Search engines, specifically Google, factor in the anchor text as part of “off-page” optimization when determining how to rank websites in their search index.

What Keywords Should I Target?

This subject has been talked about before on my blog, so here are some past posts that should help you come up with some good keywords to target for your website.

• Are You Targeting ‘Paying’ Keywords?
• Proven Strategies to Increase Website Traffic and Generate Sales
• Why Good Keyword Selection is Essential for Home-Based Business Success

Once you do some minor “on-page” optimization as talked about in at least one of the linked posts above, you’re then ready to start building links to your site and increasing your search engine rankings.

Now, as I mentioned towards the beginning of this post, there is an improper and proper use of backlinks.

The Proper Use of Backlinks

A lot of beginners think that just any link will do, specifically an plain link, and that they’ll be counted the same or equal as an anchor text link.

This isn’t true at all.

While these plain and ordinary links are counted as backlinks, they’re not given near as much weight as if they were to be anchor text links. Knowing this, you’ll now be able to take advantage of every opportunity you have to create anchor text links rather than than just a standard link.

Don’t know what the difference is?

Here is what a plain backlink looks like with no anchor text used:

Now, here is anchor text being utilized properly in a link:

See the difference?

The first link shows the full URL to the website, while the second link shows actual words that describe the site that the link is pointing to. When the second link is clicked, it will still go to the same website as in the first example.

That’s taking advantage of anchor text, where you place your target keywords in the link. Then, the more links you build up using your target keyword phrases, the higher up in search engines your website is going to rank when someone searches for that keyword.

Exceptions to the Rule

You saw this coming, right?

There are going to be times where you can’t always use an anchor text link. It just happens. That’s the nature of the internet, and it happens on a per site basis. Now, this actually isn’t a bad thing, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

There will be times where you may be on a site that allows you to put a link to your site. Some may only allow you to type in the full URL to your site, and that’s it.

My question to you is this: Do you type in your URL and get a non-anchor text backlinks, or do you just ignore it altogether and not get any backlink?

The answer I think is pretty obvious. I would much rather get a backlink whenver possible, than to give up that chance and leave that particular field blank.

NoFollow vs. DoFollow

This subject has been the center of debate since forever, and here is what I have to say about it, and what others who actually know what they’re talking about will tell you.

DoFollow links are links that Google’s spider bots will follow and index and use for their ranking algorithm. Simply put, everyone wants to get dofollow links when building backlinks because they’ll be sure to get credit for them, and they’ll help increase your site’s search engine rankings.

NoFollow links are shunned by many internet marketers because they think that nofollow links hold absolutely no value whatsoever and that it’s a waste of time to even go after these types of links.

The truth is that nofollow links do hold little value, but they DO have value, and it would be in your best interest to at least get a few nofollow backlinks.

Why?

Diversifying Your Link Building Efforts

Building links should be a natural process, done over time and in the most natural way possible. Google likes it this way, and if it thinks something fishy is going on, that can be bad news for you.

This means you don’t want to build 1,000 backlinks in one day. That’s not natural at all, and you’ll most likely get your site banned because you’ll be seen as a spammer. Not good at all.

Another thing to consider is the types of links you get, for instance: plain links, anchor text links, nofollow links and dofollow links.

The truth is that you want to get all of these types of links. It will be in your best interest to get more of the anchor text links and dofollow links, but you want to diversify your link building and keep it as natural as possible.

The next thing to consider are the sites you get links from. Getting a link from a non-relevant site, meaning a site that has nothing to do with your site, will be weighted lower than getting a link from a site that is relevant to yours. However, with that said, the Page Rank of the site is also a factor to consider. If the PR of a non-related site has a very high PR (PR 4 or higher), then it would be in your best interest to get a backlink from that site.

Now that you’ve absorbed all of this information, you’re probably wondering where you can get backlinks that are going to help your website increase its search engine rankings.

Where to Get Backlinks

This subject has also been covered pretty extensively in the past, so below are all of the posts I’ve ever written on how to build backlinks to your website. I encourage you to take some time to read over them…

• Get 80 High PR One Way Backlinks Each Month
• How I Get Backlinks to My Blog Posts Resulting in Sales
• 30 Ways to Get Free Website Traffic In Minutes
• Improve Search Engine Rankings the Easy Way
• Build Long-Term Traffic to Your Work From Home Site with Article Marketing
• Steps to Building a Successful Online Business – Article Marketing
• A Better Alternative To Article Marketing? Give Free Traffic System A Try
• Marketing Your Work From Home Web Site with Proper Use of Forum Signatures

So now you should have a strong understanding of how to use backlinks properly and how they are used to increase search engine rankings, and also where to get quality backlinks for your website/s.

I would now like to turn it over to you. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, leave a comment below…

This post is going to contain the simple, yet effective techniques I have learned during my time online to generate targeted traffic and generate sales. These are strategies I’m using for my own online business and have found to be working well and improving over time.

If you’ve been following along with us, my last post was about a struggling internet marketer who is reaching out in a desperate attempt to generate sales with his affiliate marketing website.

One of the questions asked was, “How do I drive traffic to my site that can generate sales?”

This is going to be the topic of this post, and I’ll be going very in-depth, starting with the basics and moving towards the more advanced strategies.

I apologize in advance if this turns into a very lengthy post, but please bare with me as it will be well worth your time to read through everything.

So let’s begin, shall we?

The very first thing you must understand is that everything revolves around keywords. Keywords are the life-blood of websites and how they become seen by internet users using search engines.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the foundation of using keywords effectively, and this is how you’re going to target specific internet users to generate sales online.

Rather than going in-depth on the subject of SEO on this post, I have a few previous posts that should cover this subject thoroughly enough for you to understand. Please check them out, and if you have questions use the comment section:

• Web Page Optimization
• Easy Free Keyword Research
• Discover Commercial Intention of Keyword Phrases

Optimizing your web page for specific keywords is critical and is the foundation for which you’ll build the rest of your marketing efforts upon. Seriously, nothing else matters until you’ve done this. Don’t ignore it!

One thing I’ve learned is that backlinks are KING. Okay, so content is still KING, but backlinks are a very close second, and here’s why. Backlinks to your website or web pages are what helps to drive your site or pages higher in search engine results pages when someone searches for a specific keyword phrase. See how this is coming together?

Without building backlinks to your site, you won’t generate enough traffic to your site to generate sales. Now I know what you’re thinking here. There are other ways to generate traffic without building backlinks, and that’s true. However, the best traffic is free search engine traffic, and the only way to get it is to rank on the first page in Google, or Yahoo and Bing. I’d focus on Google as it produces over 70% of search traffic across the entire web.

Now that you understand the importance of building backlinks and getting your site or web pages to the top of search engines, you now need to start the backlink building process. There are numerous ways to go about this, and luckily for you, I’ve written many posts on the subject. Here they are:

• Improve Search Engine Rankings the Easy Way
• Get 80 High PR One Way Backlinks Each Month
• Build Long-Term Traffic to Your Work From Home Site with Article Marketing
• Build Your Online Business with Article Marketing
• Forum Signatures
• Free Traffic System

Remember when building backlinks that you want to use your keywords for the web page you’re linking to. This is the only way that your backlinks are going to be effective in boosting your search engine rankings.

Okay, so you now have  a great start in getting backlinks; however, I’m not done just yet.

Well… sorta. I have a post planned that will discuss another very effect backlink building strategy and will be posted soon, so stay tuned for that.

Hopefully right now you have a solid understanding of doing keyword research and web page optimization, and how it all ties in to building backlinks. This is all part of building targeted website traffic that will result in sales.

As always, if you have any questions about anything discussed here, leave a comment below.

My next post will discuss the second question asked by a struggling internet marketer, but in the meantime, start applying the tips I mentioned today to your website, and you’ll soon see an increase in traffic and internet income.

A week ago I posted about the new Contextual Link Partnership Wordpress Plugin and how it allows you to earn free and unlimited one way backlinks to your blog.

Since the plugin was new and I just installed it on my blog, I didn’t have any results to share with you. Of course my hopes were high as this looked like the ideal setup in getting relevant backlinks.

Well, I just received an email from the owners yesterday that pretty much fortifies what I’ve already been saying about this plugin. So far they are seeing tremendous growth in the network and have started distributing backlinks.

I still have high hopes and look forward to the potential that this neat little plugin will have for my blogs, including this one.

If you would like to learn more and read up on what’s been going on just head here: http://www.contextualpartnership.com/news/over-54000-places-for-your-links/.

I would recommend grabbing this plugin and utilizing it on your blogs. You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. And don’t worry, I’m not getting paid or anything to promote it. I just see a lot of value in this and hope all of you will too.

Here’s a really cool plugin for all of you Wordpress users out there. If the idea of building relevant and natural backlinks to your blog appeals to you, which it should, then this plugin is for you. It’s called the Contextual Partnership Plugin.

The basic gist behind the plugin is that you do nothing different from just blogging as you always do. For each post you have, past and present, you can build backlinks with your chosen keywords on other relevant blogs in the network.

Notice I said network. This means that there is a network of bloggers who all have this plugin. As the network grows, there will be more and more blogs available to earn backlinks from. So, this is important as you need to spread the word to everyone you know about this plugin and have them install it on their blogs.

There’s an approval process before your blog will be available in the network. It took my blog about an hour to get approved, so you shouldn’t have any trouble either. You can install this on as many blogs as you own, which I would recommend.

The only guidelines is that you have at least five posts, have contact information readily available, and provide value in your posts.

I just installed this yesterday, and it could take a few weeks before I start seeing backlinks. I’ll keep you updated on the results.

This is one very easy and automated way of building more links to your blog. Another free method that is similar to this is the Free Taffic System. I’ve been using the Free Traffic System for quite some time now and have seen excellent results. With both of these at my disposal, I’ll be able to work less to build high quality, one way backlinks.

I recommend you take a look at the Free Traffic System and also download this free plugin so that you can start to experience the same awesome results I’m getting.

I’m a big fan of article marketing, and anyone who knows me will agree. I wouldn’t have created a whole article marketing proof video if I wasn’t 100% positive that it helps build your business for the long term. In fact, here’s my video below…

So what’s this whole Free Traffic System all about? Free Traffic System is the new age of article marketing: it has its advantages and does not have any disadvantages.

The advantages of both article marketing and Free Traffic System are obvious – Google and other search engines welcome and will always welcome the creation of new, useful, non-duplicate content and that is why search engines look favorably upon the backlinks generated this way.

Due to this “benevolent attitude” from search engines towards links built via article marketing, thousands of people have been successfully using article marketing for years to improve their positions in search engines for their targeted keywords.

BUT, unfortunately article marketing has some serious disadvantages – let’s have a look at them:

- when others republish your article they can delete your backlinks from the article

This is a huge problem! And my previous post was exactly about this topic. The owner of GetCashOnline.org decided to use one of my articles on his blog and remove MY links from MY article and insert his own self-serving links. I hate thieves!

After you have submitted your article to one of the major article directories – you lose control over your articles. Today, lots of people are using different automatic tools to “harvest” these directories for content and republish the articles on their sites. Now, probably 95% of the people that republish these articles are honest and will keep your links, but there’s always the other 5%.

The problem is that more and more people are starting to steal your content from article directories and automatically DELETE your backlinks from the resource box. OR, they steal just a tiny portion of your content (1st paragraph of your article, for example) and give a backlink to the article directory. This is great for the article directory, but not for you! This happens quite a lot to me, and I have to be honest… it PISSES me off!

With Free Traffic System you are guaranteed that pages where your content is republished will remain with YOUR backlinks. Those blogs who break this rule and touch your links (modify them/make them invisible/delete them) will be deleted from the Free Traffic System and lose access to quality content.

- duplicate content problems

You see, when one and the same article is republished, Google quickly “understands” this is duplicate content and “sees” that a big portion of your backlinks are built from duplicate content pages. This is not dangerous and Google will not punish you for doing that, but it is rumored that Google seriously lowers the SEO value of backlinks built from duplicate content pages, or just ignores them all together.

The other problem with this is that your duplicate articles will be competing against each other, and most likely Google and other search engines will just choose only one of your articles to show up in search results.

With Free Traffic System you have all the tools necessary to make each of your articles be non-duplicate, even if the article is republished on 20, 40, 100 or even more blogs. With the help of simple procedures – that will take you only an extra 5 minutes per article – you will create dozens or even hundreds of READABLE and CONCISE versions of article titles and bodies that won’t be considered duplicate. It is all in your hands: if you decide to spend 5 minutes and use the diversification tools provided by Free Traffic System, then each of the articles republished will be unique for Google and other search engines. And this will instantly increase the value of your backlinks.

Look at the comparison table to see Free Traffic System compared vs traditional article marketing.

Now I understand there are some tools available that do the same thing for your articles, like Unique Article Wizard. I also believe Submit Your Article will let you spin different versions of your article as well.

BUT… these are quite expensive, ranging from $30 – $70 per month!

Explore these advantages of building one way links with the new level of article marketing for FREE with the Free Traffic System.

As I discussed last time, the first step in building a successful online business is web page optimization and SEO. If you haven’t read that step then go re-read Steps for Building a Successful Online Business – Part 1 now because that is the foundation on which you will build your online business. You can’t skip that step! These next steps will mean nothing without proper web page optimization, and your work will be in vein. You don’t want that to happen. This is your online business we’re talking about.

Okay, so without further delay, let’s get to the next step…

Step Two: Article Marketing

This is perhaps the easiest method to building your online business. Article marketing is the basic idea of writing an article on a particular topic or niche and then submitting that article to article directories. It helps build your brand, and you’re seen as an expert in your field. It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in… article marketing works!

Now before I go any further I need to mention about the overall benefit of article marketing and how it directly relates to building your online business. This is where the SEO factor comes in.

You see, Google rates a website based on how many one way backlinks the website has pointing at it. The more backlinks, the better. This is where article marketing comes into play. In the resource box of your article you have the opportunity to place a link to your website, but not just any link. You want to use an anchor text link that uses the keyword phrase you optimized your website for. See, this is why step one is so important.

Write an article related to the niche of your website. Use your keyword phrase in the anchor text for your link in the resource box. It’s that simple. But… were not done yet. Now you have to get your article out to as many people as you can, building backlinks for your website. Read my article on the proper way to write an article and use the resource box with Article Marketing – Getting the Most Out of Your Marketing Efforts.

You want to submit your article to as many article directories as possible. This will create numerous one way backlinks all pointing to your website. The problem is that this can be quite time consuming, but it’s well worth it. There are also automated software submissions you can use to do this for you. It’s your choice. I will tell you what I do and what has worked for me.

Take a minute to watch my video to see PROOF that article marketing actually works…

I submit my articles to EzineAritcles, perhaps the most trusted and used directory. I also use Article Marketer, which distributes your articles to thousands of directories. They have a free and paid distribution, but I only use the free distribution. I also submit, by hand, to a number of other article directories, which you can find by visiting the link below.

Here is a list of resources to help you in your article marketing effort:

A list of high Page Rank article directories (the higher PR, the better for your website), Article submission software, article writing software and much more.

Everything is all on one page, so be sure to check it out. Here’s to your article marketing efforts…

Be sure to check back as I will discuss the third step in the online business building system.

Oh… and leave me a comment if you found these tips useful. Thanks!