How Backlinks bring visitors to your web pages
By admin at 14 December, 2009, 10:57 am
For any web page to be ‘ranked’ in the search engines and attract searchers it’s essential it has backlinks. 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 directs the visitor to.
The quantity of backlinks
The quantity of backlinks to a page is one of the key properties 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
Backlinks are like votes – the higher the amount of votes (backlinks) the more relevant and popular the page is viewed by the search engine. But ‘votes’ passed through backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines perception of this page than backlinks coming from pages with less ‘trust’ or authority. Obvious 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 (a ‘reward’ 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’
Similar to a label, the backlink anchor text has influence over the search engines classification 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
Many people undermine their backlinks building activities because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For instance if most 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 traffic.
How to create backlinks
So let me tell you my no nonsense method for getting backlinks that will make the search engines take notice of you and bring quality and appropriate visitors to your web pages.
- To begin with you should focus on selecting the right keywords.
- I always set out to put together a keyword cloud.
- I most often start with a single ‘top’ level keyword or key phrase which has substantial 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.
- The Google tool generates a list of keywords connected to my main keyword and from this list I grow my cloud.
- I then create content in the form of articles and videos containing backlinks with the correct ‘anchor text’ to my ‘money’ or ‘target’ page and push these to a wide range of content directories.
- My golden rule is to author content that will attract traffic and compel them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.
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