Why Backlinks bring you traffic
November 28th, 2009Often called inbound links, backlinks are the sledgehammer of search engine positioning and traffic generation. To understand backlinks there are three things you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks come from, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.
The number of backlinks
Just about all of the search engines appraise the amount of backlinks to a page when deciding where this page should be presented in the search results.
The source of the backlinks
Backlinks are very similar to votes with different ‘rights’ that are derived from where they originate from So it follows that pages with backlinks from authoritative pages will receive better consideration from the search engines. Good examples of trusted sources of backlinks carrying higher authority are pages belonging to education (.edu) and government (.gov) web sites..
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 normally 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 give to the link. Relevance is the first principle for every search engine software and it follows if the content of 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 unheard of for novices to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and easily be frustrated by their lack of progress 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 traffic.
How to build backlinks
So here is my tried and tested advice for getting backlinks to your pages, high rankings in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your site.
- Initially you should focus on choosing the right keywords.
- I like to build a keyword ‘cloud’.
- I most often start with a single ‘top’ level keyword or key phrase which has significant visitor traffic.
- To uncover the volume of visitor traffic is being generated by searches for my primary keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
- I carefully consider words and search phrases related to my ‘top’ level phrase and build my ‘cloud’.
- Using this cloud I create a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the right anchor text and then use a portfolio of content distribution systems to push my materials to a wide range of directories.
- 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.