help with backlinks

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 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 quantity of backlinks

The quantity of backlinks to a page is one of the elements the search engines consider when deciding how to position the page in the SERPS (Search Engine Page Results).

The source of the backlinks

The source of a backlink can pass authority and indeed searchers to the page to which it points. So it follows that pages with backlinks from authoritative pages will receive fairer consideration from the search engines. Obvious examples of trusted sources of backlinks carrying higher authority are pages in education (.edu) and government (.gov) web sites..

Google Page Rank

Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (an attribute awarded by Google to any 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 subject 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 all 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 issues

It’s not rare for first timers to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and easily be perplexed by their lack of progress For example 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 manufacture backlinks

So here is my tried and tested advice for getting backlinks to your pages, great positions in the search engine results pages and quality traffic to your web pages.

1. Discovering the right keywords from the beginning is critical.
2. I always set out to put together a keyword cloud.
3. I most often start with a single primary 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. The Google tool displays a list of keywords related to my main keyword and from this list I flesh out my cloud.
6. From this cloud I generate a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the right anchor text and then use a suite of content distribution tools to push my articles and videos to a wide range of directories.
7. When I author content I do so with the visitor in mind so as each piece of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.