Backlinks commonly referred to as ‘inbound links’ are critical to the visibility of your web pages in the search engines and attracting visitor traffic. When thinking about backlinks there are three things you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks are derived, 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 factors the search engines take into account when deciding how 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 traffic to the page to which it points. But ‘votes’ passed via backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines view of this page than backlinks coming 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 attributes 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 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 award 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 issues

It’s not unusual for newbies to confuse the quantity with the quality of backlinks and become quickly frustrated by their lack of progress For instance if all of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come from pages not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost always bring you the wrong traffic.

How to manufacture backlinks

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

1. It is critical you get the right keywords before you expend any effort whatsoever.
2. I like to create a keyword ‘cloud’.
3. I most often start with a single primary keyword or key phrase which has significant visitor traffic.
4. 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.
5. The Google tool puts together a list of keywords connected to my main keyword and from this list I flesh out my cloud.
6. I then generate content in the form of articles and videos containing backlinks with the right ‘anchor text’ to my ‘money’ or ‘target’ page and send these to the various directories.
7. My golden rule is to write content that will attract traffic and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my money pages as well as send backlinks.