Backlinks: A concise overview
Backlinks often called ‘inbound links’ are essential to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. When thinking about backlinks there are three elements you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks originate, the anchor text of the backlinks and the content of the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.
The number of backlinks
Just about all of the search engines consider the volume of backlinks to a web page when deciding where this page should appear in the search results.
The source of the backlinks
Backlinks are like votes with different ‘rights’ that are derived from where they originate from But ‘votes’ passed through backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines consideration of this page than backlinks coming from pages with lower ‘trust’ or authority. Great 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 a 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 normally 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 give to the link. Relevance is the first principle for all search engine algorithms and therefore 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 problems
It’s not unusual for newbies to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and easily be perplexed by their lack of progress Having a substantial number of backlinks to your page doesn’t automatically mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.
How to build backlinks
So let me tell you my fail safe process for acquiring backlinks that will make the search engines take notice of you and bring quality and relevant traffic to your web site.
- To begin with you should focus on selecting the right keywords.
- I like to build a keyword ‘cloud’.
- You should always start by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good traffic.
- To find out the volume of visitor traffic is being coming from searches for my primary keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
- I carefully consider words and search phrases related to my primary phrase and create my ‘cloud’.
- Using this cloud I generate a selection 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 systems to push my materials to a wide range of directories.
- When I write my 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.