Backlinks: Why Your Web Pages Need Them

Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 6:23 am

Backlinks often referred to as ‘inbound links’ are key to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. When thinking about backlinks there are three elements you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks come from, 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 majority of search engines count the volume 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 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 originating from pages with less ‘trust’ or authority. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are prime examples of sites that are authoritative and trustworthy.

Google Page Rank

Google has the concept 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’

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

It’s not rare for novices to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and become quickly perplexed by their lack of progress For example if most of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come 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 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 web pages.

Discovering the right keywords from the start is essential.
I always set out to put together a keyword cloud.
You should always begin by identifying a key word or phrase which has a a constant and high amount of traffic.
To discover how much visitor traffic is being generated by searches for my primary keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
I analyse words and search phrases relative to my primary phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
From this cloud I create a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks embedded with the related anchor text and then use a suite of content distribution systems to send my content to a group of directories.
When I write my content I do so with the searcher 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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