Backlinks and SEO
For any web page to be ‘ranked’ in the search engines and receive traffic it’s essential it has backlinks. When thinking about backlinks there are three things you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks are derived, the anchor text of the backlinks and the content of the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.
The quantity of backlinks
Most search engines count the number of backlinks to a page when deciding where this page should appear in the search results.
The origin of the backlinks
Backlinks are like votes – the higher the amount of votes (backlinks) the more relevant and popular the page is viewed by the search engine. But ‘votes’ passed via 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. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are obvious examples of sites that are authoritative and trustworthy.
Google Page Rank
Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (a value awarded 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’
Similar to a label, the backlink anchor text influences the search engines classification of the backlink. 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 content related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.
Common issues
A significant number of people screw up their backlinks strategies because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. Having a significant amount of backlinks to your page doesn’t necessarily mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.
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.
- Choosing the right keywords from the outset is essential.
- I always aim to create a keyword cloud.
- I always start with a single ‘top’ level 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.
- The Google tool builds a list of keywords connected to my main keyword and from this list I flesh out my cloud.
- From 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 utilize a suite of content distribution systems to push my content to a group of directories.
- My guiding principle is to write content that will attract visitors and compel them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.
