The biggest factor in website ranking is the number of back links to your website.  A back link is simply a link on another website that points to your website.  The more you have, the higher your website will rank (but with the following guidelines– read on).

You see, a link to your website is seen as an internet “vote” for your website, in the eyes of Google.  After all, the website with your website’s link is essentially encouraging it’s visitor to leave the website for your website.  And it wouldn’t do so unless it thought highly of your website, or at least that your website content is important enough to check out.  That’s how the Google algorithm interprets it.

So, now you’re thinking, “Great!  I have two other websites.  I will just place 100 links each on those websites and point them to my chiropractic  website so it will rank#1!”

Not so fast.  If it were that easy, everyone would do it.  And, Google isn’t that stupid.

Here are the basic guidelines for good back links:

• the anchor text of the link should be the keyword you’re targeting.  For example, for my chiropractic website I would like to have many links like this:  San Francisco Chiropractors pointing to my website.  This is the keyword that many people search for to find chiropractors in my area.
• the website that your back links are on should be related to your website.  So, good back links to a chiropractic website would come from health-related websites, including other chiropractic websites (more on this later).  The Google spiders analyze the content of the linking website will place more value on the back link if it is from a website in the same industry or niche as yours.
• websites with the .gov and .edu domains hold greater authority in general than .com websites.  So if you can somehow link to your chiropractic website from a government or school website, you’ll get a leg up on your competitors.
• If you have other websites in different niches, it still wouldn’t hurt to link to your chiropractic website.  But if you do, you can only do it so many times.  And make sure you link out to other websites.  For example, my San Francisco Chiropractor website has a link to Mercola.com, the biggest natural health website on the internet.
• reciprocal links aren’t as powerful as one-way links.  A reciprocal link is a “scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” set up:  you contact a website owner and offer to put his link on your site if he puts your link on his website.  Google views reciprocal links as artificial and perhaps gives them 50% weight as a one way link.

So how do you get all those one-way back links?  There are several ways, but the best way to get natural one-way back links is to write great content for your site so that other people find it informative, and link to it.  This is why blogs are so popular.  You have more artistic freedom with blogs and can write interesting and fresh content.

You can write articles about chiropractic topics like back pain, neck pain and carpal tunnel syndrome, and submit them to article directories like Ezine Articles.  You place your URL in your signature box (remember to use your keyword for the anchor text!) and submit the article to the directory.   Webmasters from all over the world browse these article directories and use the articles as content for their sites.  They are required to keep the author’s URL intact.  If you write enough articles (good ones) and they are picked up by many webmasters and added to their sites, you’ll start building up a lot of one-way back links.

A third way is to visit other blogs and forums related to health.  Create an account as a commenter, and include your website URL in your signature box (not all blogs/forums allow this, though).  Every time you post a comment, your URL will stay on the forum and you’ll have a one way link to your site.

There are several other ways to get back links to your site, including some stealth ones that most people don’t know about.  If you like to know what they are, click here.

Till next time,

Dr. Dan