Backlinks: A practical summary

Backlinks commonly called ‘inbound links’ are critical 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 are derived, the anchor text of the backlinks and the content of the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.

The amount of backlinks

The quantity of backlinks to a page is one of the key properties the search engines take into account when deciding where to position the page in the results displayed to the searcher.

The origin of the backlinks

The pages from which backlinks originate pass ‘authority’ and visitors to the page to which the backlinks point. So it follows that pages with backlinks from ‘trusted pages will receive a much higher value consideration from the search engines. Great examples of trusted sources of backlinks carrying higher authority are pages belonging to education (.edu) and government (.gov) web sites..

Google Page Rank

Google has the notion of ‘page rank’, this is the value indicator it attaches to a page it considers to have accumulated authority over time from backlinks pointing towards it.

The ‘anchor text’

Similar to a label, the backlink anchor text has influence over the search engines classification of the backlink. Relevance is the first principle for most search engine mechanisms and therefore if the text on 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 mistakes

The majority people undermine their backlinks building activities because they focus on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For example if most of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come from sites 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 risk free advice for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and quality traffic to your web pages.

1. It is essential you get 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 high volume of 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. I carefully consider words and search phrases associated with my primary phrase and create my ‘cloud’.
6. Using this cloud I create a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks embedded with the right anchor text and then utilize a portfolio of content distribution tools to push my content to a wide range of directories.
7. When I write my content I do so with the reader in mind so as each piece of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.

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