Put in layman's terms, there are two types of links that are important for SEO – inbound and outbound links. Outbound links are links that start from your site and lead to another one, while inbound links, or backlinks, come from an external site to yours, e.g. if a.com links to mydomain.com, the link from a.com is an inbound link for mydomain.com.

Backlinks are very important because they are supposed to be a measure of the popularity of your site among the Web audience. It is necessary to say that not all backlinks are equal. There are good and bad backlinks. Good backlinks are from reputable places - preferably from sites with a similar theme. These links do boost search engine ranking. Bad backlinks come from suspicious places – like link farms – and are something to be avoided. Well, if you are backlinked without your knowledge and consent, maybe you should drop the Webmaster a line, asking him or her to remove the backlink.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don't worry - buying links is an established practice and if you are serious about getting to the top, you may need to consider it. But before doing this, you should consider some free alternatives. For instance, some of the good places where you can get quality backlinks are Web directories like http://dmoz.org or http://dir.yahoo.com/.

First, look for suitable sites to backlink to you using the Backlinks Builder below. After you identify potential backlinks, it's time to contact the Web master of the site and to start negotiating terms. Sometimes you can agree to a barter deal – i.e. a link exchange – they will put on their site N links to your site and you will put on your site N links to their site - but have in mind that this is a bad, risky deal and you should always try to avoid it.

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The Google Suggest Tool provides frequently searched phrases based on the letters or words in your query. This keyword suggestion tool generates ten keywords suggested by Google for the search term you provide. Type in a word or part of a word to generate related keywords.

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There are many "SEO Gurus" that will tell you commenting on blogs can boost your page ranking a lot. Your link to your site inside blog comments does not matter much to Google! It matters more to some search engines, but definitely not Google. It does not matter if the blog is DoFollow or NoFollow because Google is not looking into it seriously. I posted so many great comments in DoFollow blogs, and they did nothing to boost my page ranking. Trust me, I looked up DoFollow blog lists on Google, and commented on hundreds of blogs. If blog commenting mattered a lot to Google page ranking, wouldn't a lot of people have high page ranks by now since there are quite a few of blogs that are DoFollow with 5+ page ranking.

You might be asking this question to yourself, "Why should I even bother with commenting then?" Because you want to get noticed! Posting comments like "nice post!" will not get you noticed. You want to add value into the discussion, and that will get the author of the blog to notice you. Ask good questions or let the author know about something that was missing in the post. Those two are just basic ideas.

What happens when you get noticed? The author might write a post base on your comment. The author might write a review post about your site. The author might write at the end of his post, "Check out this website (link), you can learn a lot from this guy about making money online". The possibilities are endless. Basically, when someone writes about you or your website, they would generally add a backlink to your site inside the post. If the person did not add a backlink to your site, you can ask nicely to include one. You have a much better chance of getting noticed when your site has a similar niche as the author.

Although Google does not care much about links inside comments, Google cares about links INSIDE the posts. Get people to notice you, and they will eventually write about you and your site. Links inside posts are the best quality backlinks you can get. To sum it all up, always write great comments if you are going to write them, and you will be rewarded sooner or later

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