It is important to get backlinks to your sites. If you have been following this blog you should know this by now. First it helps the search engines find your website and web pages but secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it adds importance to your site.

It makes a lot of sense that if a lot of different websites have a link pointing back to your site it would suggest your site is a valuable resource that is worth looking at. The search engines figure that if all these other websites rate your site enough to put a backlink to your site they should rank your site higher than others about the same subject that have fewer links pointing to them.

There is an important fact about ranking websites in the search engines hidden in that last paragraph and it is this... You do not have to make the best website in the world - you just have to make it better than your competitors sites. It is all about what the competition are doing and how they are able to convince search engines their site is better than yours and what you can do to change the 'opinion' of the search engines about the importance of your webpage.

So when it comes to links the search engines are always going to look at where the links are coming from and if there is anything odd about the number or the types of sites displaying those links.

Now, DOFOLLOW links are specifically saying to the search engine spiders, "follow this link because it matters" while NOFOLLOW links are saying here is a link but it is not so important to follow. The idea came from Google and it was to reduce the transfer of pagerank to only those links the webmaster considered important.

A lot of people worry that many of the links pointing to their site may be nofollow links which means they don't count with Google and other search engines. I believe they do count but in a different way.

What do you think they will make of a whole bunch of links that are all Do Follow links? I am pretty sure it would look odd to anyone, or any search engine autobot, to see ONLY DOFOLLOW links pointing at any site. The links will still count as links but they do not transfer any pagerank. You still get a credit for a link pointing to your site but perhaps more importantly it makes the linking look far more natural and organic.

If I were a search engine and I saw only dofollow links to a site I would think there was something odd about that because it is not likely to happen naturally from webmasters linking to your site. You would expect some to be dofollow and some to be nofollow. The conclusion must be that while dofollow links are best you should have a mixture of the two types of links pointing towards your site.

Most comments you leave on blogs are likely to use nofollow backlinks but many savvy webmasters use do follow links to encourage visitors to leave comments. You can find various software programs to help you find these sites but do remember to use other, no follow, sites as well so everything will appear natural to the search engines.

I just wanted to do a quick update to my previous post about getting to number one in google. The unusual phrase I used meant that It did in fact go straight to the number one position for a search on that phrase and it did that within a few minutes of being published on his blog.
It wa first out of no less than around 80,000,000 pages!

Now that does sound pretty impressive and it is exactly the sort of claim made by people who are selling courses and guides to building a successful online empire but you need to look a little more closely at what this result really means.

It actually means nothing. If you do a search on the same phrase but this time do the search with the phrase in quotes, which means the search is for that exact phrase with the words in that order, there are currently just two results and both refer to my page on this site.

What happened to the other 80 million results? They were pages that had some or all of the words I was searching for but not necessarily in the right order nor in one group. They were pages that had some of the words somewhere on the page.

So look carefully when you see claims made about how someone got to number one in the search engines and how they could do the same for you if you give them some money. Things are not always as they seem.

I don't want to give the impression that all guides to being successful are a sham because they are not but do take care to examine any claims of success with results in the search engines to see how much of a challenge they really are.

You may struggle to write posts every day, you may even write several posts every day in the hope that you get to number one in google but if you are targeting the wrong keywords you are probably wasting your time. Pick the right keywords and publish interesting and good quality content that attracts visitors and backlinks and you have cracked it and you will be able to boast to your Internet searching followers, "Don't you love it when you are number one in google?"

Finding the right keywords can make the difference between being number one and number one thousand in the search engines results. The phrase, don't you love it when you are number one in google, has no exact matches, though hopefully it will have this one now.

How many searches do you suppose there are for that phase? Why would anybody type that into a search? So this may prove to be a totally pointless post from the point of view of search engine results but it demonstrates the point that you must research the keywords you are attempting to rank for  if you want to get any traffic.

I could comment on blogs, write articles and promote this post until I'm blue in the face but it won't do me a lot of good from a search engine results point of view. It might intrigue a few webmasters who would wonder why on earth anyone would bother trying to rank such a phrase but no normal person is going to search for that phrase.

Take the time to do keyword research before you waste your time working on content for your website that will do nothing except allow you to be able to say to your friends you got to the number one position in the search results. Don't you just love it when you are number one in google? No, not unless it is for something that people are searching for because being number 1 doesn't make you money. Getting real visitors who are looking for what you offer is what makes the effort worthwhile.