Some people say that it’s essential to get backlinks to your web sites and articles in order to get a good search engine ranking, while others say that the quality of the article title, some keyword research and a good url is all that is needed.

I would like to give just a simple example as to why having backlinks is important, and how this can help to bring the Domino Principle into play for not just one but for all your web sites.

What Is The Domino Principle?

The Domino Principle is a “knock on effect” and  is based on something happening to one thing that in turn causes something to happen to another thing, setting off a chain reaction.

The principle is so called after what happens if you stand domino pieces in a line next to each other and push one over.  By pushing one and causing it to fall, it bumps into the domino that is next to it, causing that to fall.  The process is repeated until all dominoes in the chain have fallen over.

How Can The Domino Principle Apply To Web Traffic?

A popular humor web site that one of my humor sites has a link to, also has a link back to mine.

Whether they added the link back to mine yesterday, or whether by chance their traffic greatly increased yesterday for some reason, my humor site received about 2,000 more visitors than it usually does, all from this site (according to Google Analytics).

As well as visiting my humor site (The Laughline), many of those visitors also visited other sites of mine that I have links to on my humor site, including my Squidoo humor lenses.

As a result of this, most of my humor related lenses received more visitors than they usually do, and other lenses besides.

The Effect Is Like A Tidal Wave

The effect on traffic in this case is like a tidal wave, with the initial site receiving the most visitors, then a percentage of them following on to other sites/pages, an even smaller percentage going to yet another set of pages after that, and so on until the visitors either run out of things that interest them or run out of time.

The Long Term Effect

If the sudden influx of visitors don’t find anything that interests them, this will be just a short lived boost in traffic, however if you are fortunate (and for me tomorrow will tell) the additional traffic from that backlink will continue.

If the visitors do find something of interest (and her is where you need to be quick to spot trends and to respond to them), this might result in new subscriptions, clicks on affiliate links, and also sales from affiliate links.

How Do I Get Backlinks?

There are many places where you can get backlinks, and the best ones are those from highly rated sites that have a lot of visitors and also that are relevant to your site.

Backlinks do not have to be from the mani page on a site.  They can be “Do Follow” links where you leave your web site link on a comment on an article, and by leaving comments on popular topics  on a site (without spamming) you can generate multiple backlinks to your site.

Sometimes it pays to leave a comment on a news article that is related to something that you have written (or a Squidoo lens you have created), as the direct relevance makes the backlink more significant.

You Can Get Backlinks From News Sites

Not everyone knows this, but some of the big newspaper and news sites allow visitors to leave comments on their articles, and a few also allow you to leave your web address as well.

Don’t forget to include technical and topical news sites on your list, such as Techdirt and Slashdot.

I hope you find this useful, but if nothing else, the ONE point I wanted to get across was to never ignore the power of having backlinks to your web site, site profile, or a single page/article/lens.