Backlinks often called ‘inbound links’ are critical to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. To understand backlinks there are three things you need to consider, the web page from which the backlinks originate, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.

The quantity of backlinks

Just about all of the search engines consider the amount of backlinks to a web page when deciding where this page should be displayed in the search results.

The source of the backlinks

Backlinks are like votes with different ‘rights’ that are derived from where they originate from But ‘votes’ passed via backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines perception of this page than backlinks originating from pages with lower ‘trust’ or authority. Pages from sources such as educational (.edu) or government (.gov) sites naturally carry more trust and authority.

Google Page Rank

Google has the concept of ‘page rank’, this is the property it attributes 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 sometimes has a label a word or text associated with the content 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. 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 results related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.

Common problems

It’s not unusual for first timers to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and become quickly perplexed by their lack of progress Having a significant amount of backlinks to your page doesn’t necessarily mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.

How to build backlinks

So let me tell you my no nonsense method for getting backlinks that will make the search engines take notice of you and bring the right type and appropriate traffic to your web site.

1. To begin with you should focus on selecting the right keywords.
2. Your objective should be to end up with a keyword cloud.
3. You should always begin by identifying a key word or phrase which has a good traffic.
4. To find out the volume of visitor traffic is being generated by searches for my primary keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
5. I analyse words and search phrases relative to my primary phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
6. I then create 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 send these to the various directories.
7. When I author content I do so with the visitor in mind so as each item of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.

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