I’ve talked in previous posts about link popularity. Today, I’ll discuss backlinking - that is, links from other sites to your website - and why that’s so important.

Getting other sites to link to your site is critical to your search campaign. But not all links are rated the same. Search engines are looking for two things:

1) how many sites link to yours
2) the quality of the sites linking to yours

It’s not enough to get a bunch of links from spammy or unrelated websites. You must seek out links from sites that are high quality and relevant to your site.

How do you know who is linking to you? Both Google and Yahoo! provide you with ways to see your backlinks. Go to Google or Yahoo! and type “link:www.yourdomain.com” (without the quotes) into the search box.

I prefer Yahoo! because Google has a tendency to only show you some of your links. Yahoo, on the other hand, will rank your backlinks by how authoritative they consider the site to be, so the best sites linking to your site will be listed first.

You can also use this information to find out who is linking to your competitors’ sites and seek links from those sites. It’s possible that if they’re willing to link to your competitors, they may also link to you.

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