When you're first starting out, figuring out how to get backlinks, while not the biggest challenge for new webmasters, can nonetheless be a little confusing. Fortunately, it doesn't take too long to learn the basics. Now, you'll figure out some of your own tricks and come up with some great ideas on your own as you go, but the following tips should at least be enough to get the ball rolling.

Don't be too Desperate

If you find a website with hundreds of links and they want to swap links with you, forget it. You're sharing the strength of that site with hundreds of other links, and putting a link on your site in exchange for four or five hits just isn't worth it. What you want to do is trade links with maybe ten or twenty popular sites who, themselves, are only sharing with maybe ten or twenty other sites.

Learn SEO

Search Engine Optimization. In the early days of the internet, before search engines, backlinks were more important as a way to navigate the web. Today, the primary importance of backlinks is in boosting your search engine visibility. The main thing to keep in mind here is keywords. When you use anchor text, or linking text in your web content, make sure that the anchor text is a hot keyword. Too many keywords and your content looks stuffed. This is important, as search bots, or spiders, might actually reject your content if it's nothing but keywords, since that suggests that you're more interested in getting easy hits than you are in providing useful, readable content.

Try to Swap Links with the Highest Profile Sites You can

We mentioned that you want to save your linkswaps for reputable, high profile sites, right? Well when you're just starting out, how do you get the dot com celebrities to share some of their visitors with you? That's up to you. You can provide great content, you can offer a unique product or service, or maybe you can even get lucky and happen to email that webmaster when they're in a particularly great mood. It never hurts to ask, though, so never hesitate to ask. The worst that can happen is that they might say no.

Don't Let the Competition Get Ahead

Check out your competitor's websites. What sites are linking to them? Okay, now go link to those sites. Yes, you'll be putting your link right alongside a link to your competitor, but at least you're in the running.

And Last but not Least: Link to the Best

Let's say you run a website selling your own home brewed beer, so you send a link exchange request to some of your favorite sites on the subject, like Homebrewheaven.com, one of the top sellers of home brewing supplies. Well, even if they turn you down, there's no rule saying you can't link to them. You can link to whoever you want, and even when you don't get a link in return, a link to an industry leader can still improve your reputation, your "trust", and net you some visibility. Think of it as a sort of "digital karma".

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