Backlinks: Why quality and quantity is important

back links

For any web page to be ‘ranked’ in the search engines and attract searchers it’s essential it has backlinks. Backlinks have three key properties, the source from which the backlinks originate, the anchor text of the backlinks and the content of the page to which the backlinks directs the visitor to.

The volume of backlinks

All search engines appraise the amount of backlinks to a web page when deciding where this page should be displayed in the search results.

The origin of the backlinks

The pages from which backlinks originate pass ‘authority’ and traffic to the page to which the backlinks point. So it follows that pages with backlinks from ‘trusted pages will receive better consideration from the search engines. Pages from sources such as educational (.edu) or government (.gov) sites naturally posess more trust and authority.

Google Page Rank

Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (an attribute awarded by Google to a page that it considers over a period to have attracted, sustained and continued to accumulate relevant backlinks) pass some of their page rank via the backlink to the target page.

The ‘anchor text’

When you see a backlink on a web page it often 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 award to the link. Relevance is the guiding principle for most search engine software 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 problems

The majority people mess up their backlinks building activities because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For instance if most of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page originate 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 guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your site.

1. Initially you should focus on choosing the correct 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 work out the volume of visitor traffic is being coming from searches for my top level keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
5. I analyse words and search phrases related to my ‘top’ level phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
6. From this cloud I generate a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the appropriate anchor text and then utilize a portfolio of content distribution systems to send my content to a wide range of directories.
7. When I author content I do so with the searcher in mind so as each item of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.