backlinks

Backlinks often called ‘page links’ are essential to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. Backlinks have three key properties, the web page from which the backlinks originate, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks directs the visitor to.

The amount of backlinks

Just about all of the search engines appraise the number of backlinks to a web page when deciding where this page should appear in the search results.

The origin of the backlinks

Backlinks are like votes – the higher the number 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. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are real examples of sites that are authoritative and trustworthy.

Google Page Rank

Google has the concept of ‘page rank’, this is the property it attaches to a page it considers to have a history of accumulating authority from backlinks..

The ‘anchor text’

When you see a backlink on a web page it normally has a label a word or text related to the information at the page to which this backlink is pointing, what this ‘anchor text’ says has influence upon the value the search engines attribute to the link. Relevance is the first principle for all search engine software and it follows if the text on 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 mistakes

Many people mess up their backlinks strategies because they focus on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For instance if the majority of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page originate from pages not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost always bring you the wrong visitors.

How to build backlinks

So here is my no obligation guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, high rankings in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your site.

  1. It is critical you get the right keywords before you expend any effort whatsoever.
  2. I always set out to put together a keyword cloud.
  3. I always start with a single ‘top’ level keyword or key phrase which has substantial visitor traffic.
  4. 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.
  5. The Google tool puts together a list of keywords related to my main keyword and from this list I create my cloud.
  6. I then generate content in the form of articles and videos containing backlinks with the correct ‘anchor text’ to my ‘money’ or ‘target’ page and push these to a wide range of content directories.
  7. My golden rule is to author content that will attract visitors and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.

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Filed under: traffic building • web site promotion

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