Everything you needed to know about Backlinks

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 15:00

Posted in category Blogging Traffic, Marketing, SE Traffic, Statistics

Backlinks often described as ‘inbound links’ are critical to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. Backlinks have three key properties, the web page 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

The volume of backlinks to a page is one of the elements the search engines take into account when deciding where to position the page in the results displayed to the searcher.

The origin of the backlinks

Backlinks are like votes with different ‘rights’ that relate to where they originate from So it follows that pages with backlinks from authoritative pages will receive fairer 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 accumulated authority over time from backlinks pointing towards it.

The ‘anchor text’

When you see a backlink on a web page it sometimes 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 award to the link. Relevance is the guiding principle for every search engine algorithms and therefore 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 problems

It’s not unusual for novices to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and become quickly frustrated by their lack of progress For example if most of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come from pages not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost certainly bring you the wrong visitors.

How to manufacture backlinks

So here is my tried and tested guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your site.

Selecting the right keywords from the start is essential.
Your objective should be to manufacture a keyword cloud.
I always start with a single primary keyword or key phrase which has substantial visitor 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 analyse words and search phrases associated with my ‘top’ level 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 appropriate anchor text and then use a suite of content distribution systems to disperse my materials to a wide range of directories.
When I author content I do so with the searcher in mind so as each piece of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.

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