Backlinks and Traffic - Just Why is it Such a Big Deal?

Nowadays if we want a website to be successful, we have to deal with niche markets, great content, search engine optimization and tremendous competition. And this list is simply the starting point. We will quite possibly need to acquaint ourselves with marketing and copywriting and converting our visitors into buyers. However, for just about every webmaster, the big difficulty is bringing in traffic.

That leads us to the topic of this article. How can I attract Internet surfers to my site? One answer to this question is backlinks! So, exactly what are backlinks and just what do backlinks have to do with attracting visitors to my site?

The first thing to understand is that there are two basic forms of traffic, paid traffic and organic traffic. Examples of paid traffic are such things as advertising through pay per click networks, placing banners on other sites and any other way in which you are able to pay to attract a surfer's attention and tempt him to visit your site. If you're only focusing on paid traffic then you don't need to pay much attention to backlinks.

Organic traffic is traffic that comes from someone searching on one of the search engines for a topic which they are interested in. Then when all the free listings come up the surfer clicks on a link to visit a webpage. In the case of organic traffic the webmaster does not have to pay directly for the link which the visitor clicks on.

In general, organic traffic is simply called free traffic. Despite the fact that it can be, it usually is not really free. To get a website page included on the first couple of pages of results the webmaster will have to put in quite a lot of work. This brings us back to the topic of backlinks.

Generally, the quality and number of backlinks attached to a site are what determines sites which appear when we do a search. A backlink is nothing more than a hyperlink from one site to another. So it is very helpful if you have a whole lot of websites linking to your site if you want to be ranked highly in the organic search engine results.

But remember that quality matters too. A backlink will be seen as offering high quality if:

* The words used to create the hyperlink (called the 'anchor' text) are highly relevant to the topic of the page which the link is leading to. (You should not use "click here"!)

* The topic on the site where the backlink originates is relevant to the topic on your site.

* The site linking to you has plenty of good quality backlinks pointing to it.

* The page rank of the site linking to you is relatively high (ideally a PR3 or more) and the higher the better.

Of course there are other criteria, but the criteria given here are a very good starting point.

So, just how does a webmaster go about building up the necessary quantity of high quality backlinks pointing to his site? There are many ways of doing this and an even greater number of software programs which are designed to assist in providing the answer. Purchasing the software increases the cost of your backlinks.

The truly free way is to simply wait for other webmasters to discover your site and think enugh of it to link to it. That is super, but can take quite a long time. Of course you can contact other webmasters and ask if they will trade links with you. You simply give them a link from your site and they give you one from their site in return. These are however called reciprocal links and are generally thought to be of uncertain value these days.

Another way is to make use of Article Marketing which initially means writing articles about subjects that are relevant to your site. You then submit your articles to several article directory sites and include links of your choice in the resources box following your content. Submitting your website to a number of site directories is another method that fits into the category of free links.

You might also opt to pay for backlinks. One of the simplest methods is to buy a link directly. Internet marketing discussion boards are a very good place to find links on offer. You could pay $50 a month or more to get a link from a PR5 site. You'll get a lot of traffic from it, but you will pay for it. Naturally the lower the PR is then the lower the cost.

Whatever technique you choose, building backlinks is critical to your search engine ranking success. You'll want to acquire hundreds or if possible thousands of them. The important thing is that you get started and build up your links steadily over the months ahead so that you can begin to enjoy a steady and growing flow of traffic to your site.