Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. If you want to do a backlink check in Google on your site all you need to do is type in 'link:www.yourdomain.com' into Google. Just replace the 'yourdomain.com' part with the URL for your site or webpage (note however you won't get every backlink if you use Google - more on this below).
recommend you check out the backlink numbers for popular and competing websites to your own site so you can get an indication of how far you have to go. Don't get too discouraged if your numbers are a lot lower than other sites, just remember to keep working on your sites every day and over time backlinks will build up.
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Why should I care about backlinks?
Backlinks are important because each time someone links to your site it counts as a "vote" for it, moving it higher up in the search engine results pages (SERPS). As part of a search engine optimization strategy you should aim to build backlinks up over time. The more backlinks you accumulate the better placed in search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search your site will be.
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How do I find out how many backlinks my site has?
Each search engine has backlink look-up tools that you can test by typing in 'ink:www.yourdomain.com' into the search form. Just replace the 'yourdomain.com' part with the URL for your site or webpage. You need to use 'linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com' for the Yahoo! search engine and you can use either tag for the MSN Search Engine.
My understanding is that the 'linkdomain' tag will provide all the sites linking to your entire domain name including subpages/directories, while the 'link' tag will only show backlinks for the one webpage. Generally you should find a higher total for the 'linkdomain' look-up.
Why are my Google backlink numbers so low compared to Yahoo! and MSN backlink counts?
No one really knows the answer to this except perhaps Google employees. I've asked a lot of web marketing experts and everyone has theories but so far we have no concrete answers. Most people report that Google backlinks are often a list of the least relevant (low PageRank) backlinks or a miss-mash collection of random backlinks. I initially thought perhaps only what Google deemed as authority site backlinks would be listed but so far this has been disproved because plenty of obviously non-authority sites show up in backlinks.
Another quandary you will probably come across is sites with a good PageRank, like a 5 or 6, having very low backlink counts in Google. It boggles the mind trying to figure out what Google is doing so generally I advise people not to make any assumptions based on the Google backlink counts. Watch them to see if they go up each update and leave it at that.
If you want a good list of the sites linking back to you use Yahoo! or MSN search instead. I've been monitoring my backlinks in Yahoo! on a near daily basis and my count goes up 20-40 per day. Whether this is because Yahoo! is indexing more sites or I'm getting more links (probably both) I don't know, but it's still fun to watch so I suggest you try it too.
Relevant in content backlinking is the fastest way for you to get ranked for specific keywords. With a focus on quantity of relevant sites versus sites with particular page rank, you often will not receive the type of link juice for establishing your own Google page rank. However, you will notice faster SERP activity than with any other method (except maybe custom link building if your expert incorporates in content strategies early on).
This is the type of service different sites offer, and they have been responsible for ranking hundreds of websites for keywords across many different niches. In Content linking is great for new sites, old sites, small sites, and high PR websites because:
1. you're link is in anchor text within content relevant to the words in the link
2. Search engines see this as referencing your site to back up their content, thus encouraging their algorithms to include your site among the top sites for your keywords.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what the different backlink services are, you should be able to choose which service or services will best suit your campaign needs to gain the fastest and most long term results.
