Backlinks commonly referred to as ‘page links’ are critical to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. When thinking about backlinks there are three things you need to consider, 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 amount of backlinks
The amount of backlinks to a page is one of the factors the search engines consider when deciding where to position the page in the results displayed to the searcher.
The source of the backlinks
The pages from which backlinks originate pass ‘authority’ and searchers to the page to which the backlinks point. 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 less ‘trust’ or authority. Good 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 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’
When you see a backlink on a web page it often 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 award to the link. If the content of the page is about ‘parenting’ and the backlink on the page is labeled or given the ‘anchor’ text ‘parenting’ then the search engines consider this to be of more value to the searcher looking for sites related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.
Common problems
The majority people mess up their backlinks building activities because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For example if all 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 create backlinks
So here is my tried and tested guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, great positions in the search engine results pages and quality traffic to your site.
- Finding the right keywords from the start is essential.
- I like to build a keyword ‘cloud’.
- You should always begin by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good 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 look at words and search phrases associated with my primary phrase and create my ‘cloud’.
- Using this cloud I put together a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the related anchor text and then use a suite of content distribution tools to send my materials to a group of directories.
- My guiding principle is to author content that will attract visitors and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.