Once you create a website, one of the most important things you can do to market your site is to get some backlinks (someone linking to your website, from their website). Why? Because Google cares, that is why.  Google uses the number of backlinks that you have (among others) as a method of measuring your ranking. And the higher you are ranked, the more web traffic you should get.

But getting backlinks can be difficult if you don’t have a strategy. So with that in mind, I recommend you get out pen and paper and read The Complete List of Link Building Strategies that was created by Point Blank SEO. And remember, getting one good backlink will outweigh a hundred lousy ones – so think ‘quality’ and ‘relevancy’.

I’ve worked SEO for some years now, and remember fondly (not) how I would put my websites into various directories, lists, blogs and phone books.  Spent quite a bit of time doing it, and today find that it means next to nothing.

So I saw the image below recently on Wikipedia, under Page Rank, which clearly shows that 1 good backlink will trump a hundred lesser backlinks every time, (the orange website C).  Even though website B (red) has lots more backlinks, website C is almost as high with just the single link coming into its site from a highly ranked site.

So the point I would make here is this: stop wasting your time on getting lots of poor back links. Instead concentrate on getting authority backlinks – backlinks that are from “quality” websites relevant to your own.  I’ll write a another post on this, because it is important enough to deserve its own space.

And to be clear on one point. For a new website just starting out, the lesser known backlinks can and do help to get your site discovered around the web.

I shake my head over some of the promises being made to website owners regarding SEO.  I get lots of spam emails myself , where some SEO company based out of India is promising to make me “number 1 in the search engines!”  So let me address this a little bit, put it into perspective.

First off, the point is not just to be “number 1″ – the point is to be “number 1″ for the keyword that you want.  Huge difference.  Anyone can get number 1 rankings for the keyword phrase “doohickey 123″ by simply placing that prominently on their website. Since no one else is competing for that phrase – give it about 2 weeks and you will be number 1 in google for that term. That is the scam – they take advantage of the fact that people don’t really understand what SEO is about.

If you make yourself a website and have high hopes for it’s success, an important area to look at is who your competitors are, and what are they optimizing for. Obviously they will be optimized for the keywords people are using the most – so a good tactic for new website owners is to use keywords that are more “niche” than what your competition is doing.

So instead of optimizing for “idaho plumber” you optimize instead for “boise plumber” – you make the keyphrase less broad. To make that even more effective, you make lots of pages optimized for lots of niche keywords.

Another thing to watch out for with some SEO companies are the ones using what is called “black hat” techniques in your name. If you hire someone to get you better SEO, and they are using techniques forbidden by Google, then Google can ban your website – and it will take you awhile to recover from that.

I’ve had some good success doing SEO for my customers, and you want to know my secret?  I do what Google says I should do – and I do it very well. I admit that doesn’t sound as attractive as promising you the “number 1 position” or “10,000 backlinks” – what it is though is effective.  I’m just saying.

When creating a new website, the next important step is for you to get the word out that the website exists – to market the thing.  And for SEO purposes you need to get yourself some inbound links to your website (links coming from other websites back to yours).  So one of the basic SEO things to do is get your site added to some directories.  Directories are not what they once were – Google has downgraded most of them so they aren’t worth the effort.  And there are so many of them out there – which ones do you choose? As always when it comes to links, you need to base your decision on 1) relevancy, 2) quality and also 3) cost.

Relevancy - does the direc tory target your industry or did you have

to search their listings to find your category?

Quality - what does Google think of the site?  Ideally you want to be listed in those website directories that Google considers important.  Its all about the Google.  And stay away from those directories that are more interested in pushing their ads than pushing your listing (just my opinion).

Cost - many are free, but I’d make a guess and say a “good deal” would be a link from a good directory for about 20 / year.

I’ve created a list of website directories that you can download, an Excel file.  I have a column in it for PR, which is for Google page rank, but do feel free to modify it any way you want.  The information like PR rank and cost is about a year old or so, so be warned not to rely on it.  What I try to do is sort them by page rank, then look at each of them for quality and cost.  And then make the ‘buy’ decision from that…