User:LanaSonger917

When it comes to building your PageRank value and scraping your way up the search engines' results pages, optimizing your page with keywords and masterful internal linking will only get you so far. To get to the top, you need back links, i.e. links posted to your website on other websites. To search engines, if another website is linking to yours, that other website is giving credence to your site. In a sense, linking another site counts as a vote for that site. By building up your repertoire of back links, you are gathering votes for your site from around the Internet, and search engines will take notice of these when calculating your position on the results page. You might think that getting back links works like a meritocracy: if you have good content, then you'll get good links. If you build it, then by all means they will come. Would that it were so. Unfortunately, relying on the quality of your content (no matter how good it is) to place on the results page will take longer than going out and getting back links. There are ways to get good back links with your content. Lists will garner lots of attention. If you have a page on your site like "Worst Misconceptions About Blank" or "Best Places to Eat in Blah", that page instantly gains an air of authority, so people will link to it. You can also write content for other websites, like an article or blog post. If you write guest content on a website like yours, then that website's readers become interested in your website. You sign your blog post with your name and an encouraging link (not "click here", but a link whose anchor text is a keyword relevant to your site). Not only does this link build your PageRank, but you gain an audience who might link to you from their own pages in the future. There are good ways to get back links, and there are bad ways. Buying your back links is a bad way. The link-as-vote analogy is particularly apt here. We think it's wrong if a politician pays people to vote for him, so we also think it's wrong if a web master pays people to link to his website. It's cheating, and search engines will know which links on your site are legitimate. If you have a bad link, then your PageRank will take a hit. So much the worse if you actually bought the link, since you basically paid money to lose PageRank. Also, consider again how you wrote an article for another site. This will only work if the link is one-way, i.e. if his site links to yours, but not the other way around. Reciprocal linking will actually result in losing PageRank to the other site, so it's a good idea not to do reciprocal linking, and to be careful when doing content exchanges like the kind mentioned above. Building a repertoire of solid Backlinks takes time and patience, but it will pay off when you have a high PageRank value and place high on search engine results pages.