I may be on the verge of figuring out some of the concepts regarding making money online.  I have been working on this for five full months now since the last week of May 2009.  I started over at Squidoo but learned about HubPages about the same time.  I much preferred this site in terms of ease of use and business model.  Not to mention, I found the community here much more friendly and helpful at the time.  There are several experienced Hubbers who welcomed me and helped me along and for that I am forever grateful.

Now back to the article.  It took me a while to figure out what a backlink is.  For those who don’t know, it is a link from one web page back to another.  It is what you click to move from here to another article.  So why are these links important?  These links can be used to help drive traffic to your articles or website in a couple ways.

• First, they help you get noticed on the web.  The internet is an awfully big place and unless you are standing up and shouting, no one will notice you.  That is why it is important to work on placing your own links out on the web.
• Links are used by the search engines as a way of tabulating votes for an article or site.  I learned this through my SEO experiment.  It is possible to create links yourself or have others link to your content.  The more authority a site has, the more important its link in terms of helping your content in search engine ranking.

I have come to believe that backlinks are just as important, if not more so, than the actual content.  If you take similar content, the one with the greater number of links will be exposed to the greatest number of readers who might just click on that link to read your stuff.  Your stuff will probably also then rank higher in the search engines and get organic traffic leading to increased revenue.

I feel that I have done a poor job thus far of using links to their full potential.  My goal for the month of November is to do a better job of linking to my articles, leaving relevant comments on blog posts, and leaving social bookmarks on sites such as Xomba.  My plan is to have at least 2 or 3 links in each of my articles or blog posts and to place 2 or 3 links on the web each day for the month of November.  In doing so, I hope to increase my traffic and see what the impact on earnings will be.