Every website or blog owner wants to drive traffic to their website. After all, no matter how nice your site looks, without visitors tour website is not worth a dime to your business.

You can pay an SEO ‘expert’ hundreds of dollars for a promise to get your website ranking at the top of the search engines, but really it’s not rocket science, and anyone can achieve the same success in a few steps and a little understanding.

Backlinks
Lets start with Backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites which link directly back to your website.
It’s easy to swap links with other websites, but you don’t want just any links…you want ‘quality’ backlinks.

Both the popularity and the importance of your website is gauged by how many other website owners consider your website worth linking to, much of which is dependent upon how many sites link back to you.
This is done purely for Search Engine Optimization and getting Google to love your website, rewarding your website by giving it a high page ranking.

Sounds easy, right? Simply link to sites and you’ll get a good Google PR. Wrong!
Before you rush off and madly find sites to swap links with, there are a few rules to avoid bad links and only find the quality links. It’s the quality links that will turn Google in your favour.
Quality backlinks are links from sites with similar content to yours, and are also relevant to their (and your) domain name, the industry and products the website portrays.
From Google’s point-of-view, it’s all about relevancy and the success of your website, and website marketing.

The search engines calculate the keyword relevancy and keyword density for a website, and that figure is also based upon the percentage of related content found on either end of the links.
So for example, if your content is about travel, and the links on the other sites have nothing to do with travel than the link is considered not relevant and you will lose pagerank or be ignored by the search engine spiders.
So not only make sure your website is backlinking to other sites with relevant content, but also make sure they are also linking to other relevant sites, or it will have a ripple effect and drag your pagerank down as well.

It is extremely important for you to regularly check your links and keep track of which sites are linking back to you. If all the links are outbound and not reciprocated with a link back to you, the site on the other end will get all the traffic, and the pagerank.

There are number of tools which can help you with an automated process to check the links for you. I recommend Web CEO software, as it does a thorough fast job, and it can also find reciprocal links for you too, but you can find other good software by simply searching on Google for “verifying reciprocal links” (include the quotes around the text for best results), and you’ll get a list of tools you can use to check.

Anchor Text Backlinks
Another way of creating good backlinks is by using ‘anchor text’, which is actually a link on your own website, but set up correctly to add keyword relevancy, it can help greatly.
For instance, if you have some text that says ‘Click Here’, try changing it to ‘Cheap Travel tips, visit our website’, this uses the keywords which relate to your travel site, and if hyperlinked to a page with a similar title, the search engines will go crazy for it. Text added like this through your site is called ‘anchor text backlinks’.

Finding Reciprocal Sites
There are many ways to find great related sites to exchange with. As mentioned, I use Web CEO, but you can also do it manually by simply using Google, and typing in the particular keywords which relate to your website, and see which competitors come up first. Chances are part of the reason they are in the top spots on the first page of Google is due to their backlinks.
Visit the websites and see if you can contact their webmaster for a link exchange. Some will decline as they might be in direct competition to you so don’t take it personally.
You can improve your success in attracting links though by providing them with details of your current pagerank position, and also a title and description of your site which you’d like them to add, and of course tell them you have already added a link on your website for them. If they decline, simply remove the link from your site, but give them plenty of time to respond.

Author: Chris Bourke – WebSEOCoach.com and UltimateCashBlog.com
Chris is a web designer, search engine optimization pro, and internet marketer from Australia