Basics of Backlinks

    by on Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 | 3 Comments

    This post covers the most important basics you need to know about backlinks. Acquiring as many backlinks as possible is one of the most important search engine optimization factors – particularly Google pays a lot of attention to the amount of links pointing to a site. Some backlinks will help your site climb in ranking more than others, though. Read on to find out about the three factors that determine how good a backlink is in terms of SEO. These three factors are: Amount, value and anchor text.

    Following are descriptions of each of the three factors:

    Amount

    The first factor is very simple. More backlinks means higher rankings. As a rule of thumb, at least.

    The thinking behind this is simply that every link to your site represents something like a “vote”. After all, people tend to link to things that they like and that they recommend to others.
    And the more recommendations, in the form of inbound links, a site is getting from others all around the net, the better we can assume it’s content is.

    This could be all it takes to rank websites fairly, but for one little factor: Money. But because there are many people with commercial interests online and it’s fairly easy to build links yourself, determining rank based solely on the amount of backlinks would just result in those pages whose owners have the most powerful link-spamming bots working for them to rank highest.

    That’s why two more (main) factors come into play:

    Worth

    This is the most debated and most elusive factor determining website ranks. The simple truth is that no one, save for a few Google employees, knows exactly how backlink-value is determined.

    Here are some factors we can be pretty certain about:

    Size and Authority of Page
     A link coming from a high authority website is more valuable than one coming from a low authority website. However, exactly how the authority of a website is determined would warrant an article (or even a book) of it’s own. For the puposes of this post, we can assume that the larger and more active (i.e. more visited) a site is, the higher it’s authority and conversely the greater the value of links coming from that site would be.

    As example, a link coming from a blog with thousands of subscribers and many people participating in the comments is more valuable than a link coming from a blog that hasn’t been updated in months and sees hardly any traffic.

    Link Position
    Where on a web page a link is located is also an important factor. For example, if a link is placed in the sidebar of a blog, it is slightly less valuable than if it’s placed inside the body content of the same blog. The same thing goes for links placed in comments. The context, and number of other links on the same page also play a part. For example, if your link is just one among hundreds a page consisting mainly of links, then it’s not very valuable.

    Link Distribution
    In a greater context, it also matters where your links are coming from. For example, if hundreds of links are all coming from the same domain or the same IP address, then they are not as valuable as if the same number of links were coming from lots of different domains and IP addresses.

    Anchor-text

    Last but not least, the anchor text of links pointing to your site has a great influence in which keywords the site will rank for. As a side note: The anchor text is the (usually blue and underlined) text that takes you to a website when you click it.

    Search engines use anchor texts in part to determine what a site is about. If the majority of links pointing to a site have the anchor text “dog training”, then that’s what the site is probably about. When building backlinks, you should take care not to use identical anchor texts for all your links, though. This will make your backlink-profile look spammy.

    My personal recommendation is to use your targeted keyword as the anchor text in about 70% of the links you build, closely related terms in about 20% of the links and unrelated/general terms (like “click here”) in about 10% of the links.

    Rule of thumb

    The general guideline for link-building is actually quite simple: You want the backlinks to look natural and not spammy or fake.

    Diversity is key, in this regard. Links coming from different sites, different IP addresses and featuring different anchor texts make for a good, natural looking link profile.
    It also doesn’t hurt to get some links from low-authority sites and smaller blogs etc. As long as it doesn’t take you too much time to get those links, even low value links are useful and make your overall link profile look more natural.

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    3 Responses to “Basics of Backlinks”

    1. Lucas Parker says:
      September 28, 2010 at 12:55 am

      SEO marketing helps a lot in introducing new products on the market.*~

    2. LED Torch  says:
      October 13, 2010 at 6:44 pm

      SEO marketing is the thing that we should master coz we can make lots of money from it“;

    3. Electric Cement Mixer : says:
      October 25, 2010 at 9:34 am

      seo marketing takes some time compared to viral marketing but seo marketing drives continous potential customers over a long pe:`;

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