Everything you needed to know about Backlinks

backlinks

For any web page to be ‘ranked’ in the search engines and attract searchers it’s essential it has backlinks. To understand backlinks there are three things you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks are derived, the anchor text of the backlinks and the content of the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.

The number of backlinks

The majority of search engines appraise the amount of backlinks to a web page when deciding where this page should be displayed in the search results.

The origin of the backlinks

Backlinks are like votes – the higher the quantity of votes (backlinks) the more authoritative the page is viewed by the search engine. But ‘votes’ cast through backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines consideration of this page than backlinks coming from pages with lower ‘trust’ or authority. Good examples of trusted sources of backlinks carrying higher authority are pages in education (.edu) and government (.gov) web sites..

Google Page Rank

Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (a value awarded by Google to any page that it has observed over a period to have attracted, sustained and continued to accumulate relevant backlinks) pass some of their page rank via the backlink to the target page.

The ‘anchor text’

Just like a label, the backlink anchor text has influence over the search engines valuation of the backlink. If the content of the page is about ‘parenting’ and the backlink on the page is labeled or given the ‘anchor’ text ‘parenting’ then the search engines consider this to be of more value to the searcher looking for results related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.

Common issues

Many people mess up their backlinks strategies because they focus on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For example if all of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come from pages not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost always bring you the wrong traffic.

How to build backlinks

So here is my risk free advice for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and quality traffic to your site.

1. Choosing the right keywords from the outset is critical.
2. Your objective should be to end up with a keyword cloud.
3. You should always start by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good traffic.
4. The fastest and cheapest method to find out how much traffic a keyword or key phrase is getting is to use the Google keywords discovery tool.
5. I look at words and search phrases associated with my ‘top’ level phrase and create my ‘cloud’.
6. I then create content in the form of articles and videos in which I have embedded backlinks with the correct ‘anchor text’ to my ‘money’ or ‘target’ page and distribute these to the various directories.
7. My guiding principle is to write content that will attract visitors and compel them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.