back links

Backlinks commonly referred to as ‘inbound links’ are key to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. Backlinks have three key properties, the source from which the backlinks are derived, the anchor text of the backlinks and the content of the page to which the backlinks directs the visitor to.

The volume 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 SERPS (Search Engine Page Results).

The source of the backlinks

Backlinks are like votes – the higher the volume of votes (backlinks) the more authoritative 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 view 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 ‘reward’ given by Google to each page that it considers 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 has influence over the search engines classification of the backlink. 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 perspective, 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 unheard of for first timers to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and easily be frustrated by their lack of progress For example if a significant number 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 traffic.

How to manufacture backlinks

So here is my risk free guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and quality traffic to your site.

1. It is critical you select the right keywords before you expend any effort whatsoever.
2. I like to build a keyword ‘cloud’.
3. You should always start by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good traffic.
4. To uncover the volume of visitor traffic is being coming from searches for my primary keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
5. I carefully consider words and search phrases related to my ‘top’ level phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
6. Using this cloud I put together a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the right anchor text and then use a suite of content distribution tools to disperse my materials to a wide range of directories.
7. My golden rule is to write content that will attract traffic and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.