Ok, you've got a brand new web site. It looks great, has wonderful content. A smart friend of yours tells you that you need links pointed to your website. He says that this will increase your search engine rankings and get you more traffic. But, what are the realistic expectations of when you will receive these high rankings and increased traffic?

Link Building and The MSN Search Engine

First of all, you must know that all search engines are not equal. Each of the search engines have different algorithms for ranking. Also, each of the search engines have different period of times before they will "count" your links.

Good news! MSN is the fastest for "counting" your link building efforts. MSN takes about 21-30 days to "count" your backlinks. So, for your brand new website, start here and try to rank on MSN first. Also, MSN seems to "count" just about any type of link, relevant or not. So, you could go out and get 1000 links from a really bad link building service and get high ranks on MSN. Although, we do not recommend it and you will find out why later in this article.

How To Check Backlinks On MSN
To check your backlinks on MSN (which is very accurate by the way), go to http://www.msn.com and type in link: and your full website url.

Link Building For The Yahoo Search Engine

On Yahoo, you must have more patience...a lot more patience. Links start to get "counted" in 60-90 days, however, the full weight of a backlink is not counted for 8 months. So, if you want to rank on Yahoo, make sure that the links you are getting will last for at least 9 months.

Yahoo does not seem to pay close attention to relevance at this time. But, it does count how popular the website is that gave you the link. An easy way to measure the link popularity of a website is to get the Google toolbar and look at the PageRank (higher the better). We are nearly certain that Yahoo will be putting more weight on how relevant the website is to yours that is linking to you in 2006. (i.e. Is the content similar in nature? Real Estate website linking to a real estate website would be a good thing)

How To Check Backlinks On Yahoo
Checking your backlinks on Yahoo is the same as MSN. Please keep in mind that Yahoo seems to report only 1/2 as many links as MSN does (or less). Also, it will take 60-90 for your link to appear (some links will appear faster based on link popularity of the website). To check your backlinks, go to Yahoo and type in link:http://www.yourwebsite.com

Google Link Building

You are going to need more than patience with Google. These guys are wicked smart. For starters, do not expect any new website to rank for a medium to hard keyword phrase for at least 14 months. Now, with that out of the way, let's talk about link building. Due to the Jagger update in November 2005, Google no longer likes reciprocal links (where you give a link to get a link). Google no longer likes link directory links (usually categorized and your link is mixed in with 20 or more links). Google does not like it when you get too many links too fast (the rate differs for each vertical market).

So, what does Google like? Google likes:

One way links (or 3 way link trades, no reciprocal links)
Permanent links
Relevant links
Differring anchor text

After your website has been around for 14 months, you can expect your links to be partially counted (as long as you didn't get them too fast for your vertical market). Any new links that you get that are one-way and relevant should be partially counted within 90 days. We do not know how long until the link is fully counted because it depends on the vertical market that you website is in.

How To Check Backlinks On Google
Attention: Google will only show a small random sampling of your backlinks.

Checking your backlinks is the same as the other search engines. Google typically shows about 1/10 (or less) of a websites true backlinks using the link: command. To check your backlinks, go to Google and type in link:http://www.yourwebsite.com

For more information on getting your home online business ranked well on search engines please visit our site. We have a whole section set up just for search engine ranking.