Why backlinks are essential to bringing traffic to your web pages
Often referred to as inbound links, backlinks are the sledgehammer of search engine positioning and traffic generation. Backlinks have three key properties, the web page from which the backlinks originate, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks sends the visitor to.
The amount of backlinks
The volume of backlinks to a page is one of the elements 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
The source of a backlink can pass authority and indeed visitors 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. Pages from sources such as educational (.edu) or government (.gov) sites naturally are attributed with more trust and authority.
Google Page Rank
Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (a ‘reward’ awarded by Google to any 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 often 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. 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 information related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.
Common issues
It’s not unheard of for newbies 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 pages not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost certainly bring you the wrong traffic.
How to manufacture backlinks
So here is my tried and tested advice for getting backlinks to your pages, high rankings in the search engine results pages and quality traffic to your site.
- It is critical you select the right keywords before you expend any effort whatsoever.
- I always set out to create a keyword cloud.
- I most often start with a single primary keyword or key phrase which has significant visitor traffic.
- 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.
- I look at words and search phrases related to my ‘top’ level phrase and create my ‘cloud’.
- From this cloud I create a library of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the appropriate anchor text and then utilize a suite of content distribution tools to disperse my materials to a group of directories.
- My guiding principle is to author content that will attract visitors and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.