Backlinks

Posts Tagged ‘backlinks’

Backlinks: A concise overview

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Backlinks often called ‘inbound links’ are key to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. Backlinks have three key elements, 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

All search engines count the quantity of backlinks to a web page when deciding where this page should be displayed in the search results.

The origin of the backlinks

The pages from which backlinks originate pass ‘authority’ and traffic to the page to which the backlinks point. But ‘votes’ passed via backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines view of this page than backlinks originating from pages with lower ‘trust’ or authority. Pages from sources such as educational (.edu) or government (.gov) sites naturally are attributed with more trust and authority.

Google Page Rank

Google has the concept of ‘page rank’, this is the property it awards 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 sometimes has a label a word or text related to the subject at the page to which this backlink is pointing, what this ‘anchor text’ says has influence upon the value the search engines award to the link. Relevance is the first principle for every search engine algorithms and it follows if the text on the page is about ‘drying chillis” then it is from a search engine’s point of view, more valuable for the backlink’s anchor text to this page to contain the word ‘chilli’ as opposed to a related term such as ‘drying spices’.

Common mistakes

The majority people mess up their backlinks strategies because they focus on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. Having a significant number of backlinks to your page doesn’t automatically mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.

How to create backlinks

So here is my risk free guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, high rankings in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your web pages.

It is critical you get the right keywords before you expend any effort whatsoever.
I always set out to create a keyword cloud.
You should always begin by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good traffic.
To discover the volume of visitor traffic is being generated by searches for my top level keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
I look at words and search phrases relative to my primary phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
Using this cloud I put together a library of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks embedded with the related anchor text and then utilize a portfolio of content distribution systems to push my content to a group of directories.
My guiding principle is to write content that will attract visitors and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my money pages as well as send backlinks.