help with backlinks

Backlinks often referred to as ‘inbound links’ are essential 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 web page 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 number of backlinks

Most search engines look at the quantity of backlinks to a web page when deciding where this page should be displayed in the search results.

The origin of the backlinks

Backlinks are very similar to votes with different ‘rights’ that relate to where they originate from So it follows that pages with backlinks from authoritative pages will receive a much higher value consideration from the search engines. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are great examples of sites that are authoritative and trustworthy.

Google Page Rank

Google has the notion 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’

Just like a label, the backlink anchor text has influence over 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 information related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.

Common problems

A lot of people screw up their backlinks strategies because they focus on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. Having a substantial number of backlinks to your page doesn’t automatically mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.

How to build backlinks

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

1. Discovering the right keywords from the beginning is critical.
2. Your objective should be to end up with a keyword cloud.
3. I most often 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. I analyse words and search phrases associated with my ‘top’ level phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
6. I then generate content in the form of articles and videos in which I have embedded backlinks with the right ‘anchor text’ to my ‘money’ or ‘target’ page and distribute these to the various directories.
7. When I author 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.