Backlinks: What you need to know
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 quantity of backlinks
The volume of backlinks to a page is one of the factors the search engines take into account when deciding how to position the page in the SERPS (Search Engine Page Results).
The origin of the backlinks
Backlinks are like votes - the higher the number of votes (backlinks) the more relevant and popular the page is viewed by the search engine. But ‘votes’ passed through backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines perception of this page than backlinks originating from pages with lower ‘trust’ or authority. Good examples of trusted sources of backlinks carrying higher authority are pages belonging to education (.edu) and government (.gov) web sites..
Google Page Rank
Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (a value given by Google to each 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 influences the search engines classification of the backlink. Relevance is the first principle for all search engine algorithms and it follows if the content of 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
A significant number of people screw up their backlinks building activities because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For example if a significant number 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 visitors.
How to build backlinks
So let me share with you my fail safe approach for acquiring backlinks that will make the search engines take notice of you and bring quality and relevant visitors to your web pages.
- To begin with you should focus on selecting the right keywords.
- Your objective should be to manufacture a keyword cloud.
- I always start with a single ‘top’ level keyword or key phrase which has substantial visitor traffic.
- To uncover the volume of visitor traffic is being generated by searches for my top level keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
- The Google tool displays a list of keywords related to my main keyword and from this list I create my cloud.
- Using this cloud I generate a library of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks embedded with the right anchor text and then use a portfolio of content distribution tools to send my content to a wide range of directories.
- When I author content I do so with the searcher in mind so as each item of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.
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Tags: backlinks, Internet Marketing, link building, search engine marketing, SEO, Traffic Building