For any web page to be ‘ranked’ in the search engines and attract visitors it’s critical it has backlinks. To understand backlinks there are three things you need to consider, the web page from which the backlinks are derived, the anchor text of the backlinks and the content of the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.

The amount of backlinks

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

The origin of the backlinks

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

Google Page Rank

Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (a value given by Google to a page that it has observed 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 sometimes has a label a word or text associated with the information 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 content related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.

Common problems

It’s not unheard of for newbies to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and become quickly frustrated by their lack of progress Having a substantial number of backlinks to your page doesn’t necessarily mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.

How to build backlinks

So here is my tried and tested guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, high rankings in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your site.

1. Discovering the right keywords from the start is essential.
2. I always aim to create a keyword cloud.
3. I most often start with a single primary keyword or key phrase which has substantial visitor traffic.
4. To uncover the volume of visitor traffic is being generated by searches for my top level keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
5. The Google tool puts together a list of keywords associated with my main keyword and from this list I create my cloud.
6. Using this cloud I create a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the related anchor text and then use a portfolio of content distribution tools to send my articles and videos to a group of directories.
7. My golden rule is to write content that will attract traffic and compel them to follow the backlinks to my money pages as well as send backlinks.