Getting quality back links should be the goal of every blogger. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a back link is a link from another website to your own. These links are what convince Google of your value and help move your website up the Search Engine Result Pages to ensure people can find you.

Why does it matter? Simply put, Google is a robot and in order for it to assign value to your website it has to do some fancy math calculations. One of those fancy equations it uses basically boils down to how many quality websites link to your website. So, generating quality links from multiple websites will help increase your value in the Google database.

To do this, you need to convince other website owners to link to your content but there’s a draw back. If a quality website owner links to too many lower quality websites, his own site will suffer in the Google ranks … which means that most high quality sites are reluctant to link to your site.

Do I have a good site? Using a tool such as PRChecker you can see the current value of your website and check the value of other sites. The more quality websites which rank to your site, the more Google will believe that you’re a quality site. It’s basically a lot like high school … the trick is to get one of the popular kids to like you, then the others will start to accept you as time goes on.

Now that you know your own PageRank, it’s time to start looking at the best place to get quality backlinks. One of my favorite articles on the subject is The Best Places to Get Quality Backlink. Using this great list of websites, you can look for sites more influencial than your own site and begin generating back links from those sites.

How do I generate a backlink? There are simply two ways to get links:

1. Write content on your site that the owner of these sites want to link to. This is the best way to do it, be the best content provider on a subject and people will link to you, it’s really that simple.
2. Participate in discussions, comments, threads, forums and posts which provide links back to your site. For example, if you can add a valuable comment to a thread and include a link back to your website you should take that opportunity to do so. Remember, do not SPAM.