backlinks clinic

Backlinks commonly described as ‘inbound links’ are key to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. Backlinks have three key properties, the web page from which the backlinks come from, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks directs the visitor to.

The quantity of backlinks

The amount of backlinks to a page is one of the key properties the search engines take into account when deciding where to position the page in the results displayed to the searcher.

The source of the backlinks

Backlinks are very similar to votes with different ‘rights’ that relate to where they originate from But ‘votes’ passed via backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines consideration 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 posess more trust and authority.

Google Page Rank

Google has the notion of ‘page rank’, this is the value indicator it attaches 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 normally has a label a word or text related to 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. Relevance is the guiding principle for every search engine algorithms and therefore if the content of the page is about ‘drying chillis” then it is from a search engine’s perspective, 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

Many people screw up their backlinks strategies because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For example if all of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come from sites not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost certainly bring you the wrong visitors.

How to create backlinks

So here is my no obligation advice for getting backlinks to your pages, high rankings in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your web pages.

1. Finding the right keywords from the outset is critical.
2. I like to create a keyword ‘cloud’.
3. I always start with a single ‘top’ level keyword or key phrase which has significant visitor traffic.
4. To work out how much visitor traffic is being coming from searches for my top level keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
5. The Google tool creates a list of keywords connected to my main keyword and from this list I create my cloud.
6. Using this cloud I create a library of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks embedded with the related anchor text and then utilize a suite of content distribution tools to disperse my content to a wide range of directories.
7. My guiding principle is to write content that will attract traffic and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.