How Backlinks bring visitors to your web pages

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 4:40 pm

Sometimes referred to as inbound links, backlinks are the oxygen of search engine positioning and traffic generation. When thinking about backlinks there are three elements you need to consider, 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 number of backlinks

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

The origin of the backlinks

The pages from which backlinks originate pass ‘authority’ and searchers to the page to which the backlinks point. So it follows that pages with backlinks from authoritative pages will receive fairer consideration from the search engines. Good 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 (a ‘reward’ awarded by Google to each 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’

Just like a label, the backlink anchor text influences the search engines valuation of the backlink. 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 sites related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.

Common issues

A significant number of people undermine their backlinks strategies because they focus on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For example if all of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page originate from pages not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost always bring you the wrong visitors.

How to create backlinks

So here is my tried and tested guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and quality traffic to your web pages.

Selecting the right keywords from the beginning is essential.
Your objective should be to end up with a keyword cloud.
You should always begin by identifying a key word or phrase which has a a constant and high amount of 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 relative to my primary phrase and create my ‘cloud’.
Using this cloud I put together a library of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the appropriate anchor text and then use a suite of content distribution systems to disperse my materials to a wide range of directories.
When I author content I do so with the reader in mind so as each piece of content attracts backlinks to itself as well as sends backlinks to my target pages.

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