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.

Be Careful with Your Linkswaps

Somebody linking to you can never hurt, but you need to be careful about who you’re linking to. Remember, you’re trading webspace for webspace when it comes to hosting a link, so bear in mind that your webspace is often more valuable than another site’s webspace. For example, a website that hosts literally dozens of other links is likely to host yours, as well, but who’s going to find your link buried under dozens of others? It would be better to save that linkswap for a site that keeps its links section down to select handful of, say, ten or twenty links, tops.

Read up on SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and a little SEO know-how is a must for a successful website these days. Back in the early to mid nineties, backlinks were used primarily as a means of navigation around the web, in lieu of any good search engines, but today, backlinks are all about SEO, or keywords, to be specific. If you have anchored text, or linked text, in your web content, make sure that you’re using a hot keyword. Someone looking for a wedding photographer, for example, is going to type “Wedding Photographer” into Google, not “Guy to take pictures while me and the old lady get hitched”.

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, see who they’re sharing links with, and see if the sites they’re linking with will link with you. This does put you on a website right alongside your competitors, but let’s face it: Competition is the name of the game. The point is to get yourself in the running rather than sitting by wishing you could get some hits.

And Last but not Least: Link to the Best

Not who you’re linked from. Now, of course, it can’t hurt to have as many backlinks to your site out there as possible, but if you have a bunch of links on your site to crummy web pages, it can hurt your site’s trust, in both the viewer’s eyes and in Google’s. Let anyone who wants to link to you, but be careful who you link to. If you link to the authorities on a subject, that improves your link’s trust. So for, say, a site about pets, you could link to the American Kennel Society, but you probably wouldn’t want to link to an AOL member’s page about their poodle, Twinklebelle.