Backlinks often called ‘page links’ are essential to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. To understand backlinks there are three elements you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks originate, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks directs the visitor to.
The quantity of backlinks
Just about all of the search engines appraise the quantity of backlinks to a web page when deciding where this page should appear in the search results.
The origin of the backlinks
Backlinks are very similar to votes with different ‘rights’ that are derived from where they originate from So it follows that pages with backlinks from ‘trusted pages will receive a much higher value consideration from the search engines. Pages from sources such as educational (.edu) or government (.gov) sites naturally posess more trust and authority.
Google Page Rank
Google has the concept of ‘page rank’, this is the value indicator it attributes to a page it considers to have a history of accumulating authority from backlinks..
The ‘anchor text’
When you see a backlink on a web page it normally has a label a word or text associated with the subject at the page to which this backlink is pointing, what this ‘anchor text’ says has influence upon the value the search engines give to the link. 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
A significant number of people undermine their backlinks strategies because they focus on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. Having a significant amount of backlinks to your page doesn’t necessarily mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.
How to build backlinks
So here is my risk free guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your web pages.
- Choosing the right keywords from the start is essential.
- Your objective should be to manufacture a keyword cloud.
- You should always begin by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good traffic.
- 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.
- I carefully consider words and search phrases relative to my ‘top’ level phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
- From this cloud I generate a library of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks embedded with the related anchor text and then use a portfolio of content distribution tools to push my content to a wide range of directories.
- My guiding principle is to write content that will attract traffic and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my money pages as well as send backlinks.