back links

Often called inbound links, backlinks are the sledgehammer of search engine positioning and traffic generation. Backlinks have three key properties, the web page from which the backlinks come from, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks directs the visitor to.

The number of backlinks

The number of backlinks to a page is one of the elements the search engines consider when deciding how to position the page in the results displayed to the searcher.

The source of the backlinks

Backlinks are like votes – the higher the number of votes (backlinks) the more relevant and popular the page is considered by the search engine. But ‘votes’ cast through backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines perception of this page than backlinks coming from pages with less ‘trust’ or authority. Obvious 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 (an attribute 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’

When you see a backlink on a web page it sometimes has a label a word or text associated with the content at the page to which this backlink is pointing, what this ‘anchor text’ says has influence upon the value the search engines attribute to the link. Relevance is the guiding principle for all search engine software and it follows if the information 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

It’s not unusual for first timers to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and become quickly perplexed by their lack of progress For example if the volume of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come from sites not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost certainly bring you the wrong traffic.

How to create backlinks

So let me tell you my no nonsense method for acquiring backlinks that will make the search engines love you and bring the right type and relevant visitors to your web pages.

1. It is critical you get the right keywords before you expend any effort whatsoever.
2. I like to create a keyword ‘cloud’.
3. You should always begin by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good traffic.
4. To find out the volume of visitor traffic is being generated by searches for my top level keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
5. I look at words and search phrases relative to my primary phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
6. Using this cloud I generate a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks embedded with the appropriate anchor text and then use a portfolio of content distribution tools to disperse my articles and videos to a wide range of directories.
7. When I write my content I do so with the visitor in mind so as each piece of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.

Tags: backlinks, internet marketing, link building, search engine marketing, seo, traffic building