This article covers all the basics you should know about backlinks for SEO. 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. In this post, I describe the three things that matter most, in terms of backlinks. The 3 factors are: Number of backlinks, backlink value and anchor text.
Following are descriptions of each of the three factors:
Amount
This one is not too difficult to understand. More backlinks = better. That’s the gist of it.
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:
Value
It’s actually impossible to accurately determine the value of any single link and there’s lots of debate about this subject. 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:
Page Rank
Links coming from authority sites with high Page Rank are generally more valuable than links from small and obscure sites. However, exactly how the authority of a website is determined would warrant an article (or even a book) of it’s own. You can assume that the more traffic a website is getting, the more people are participating on that website and the higher the Google PR of that website is, the more valuable a link from it will 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 Placement
Where on a web page a link is located is also an important factor. For example, a link placed in the footer of a website is less valuable than a link that is part of the main text on the page. It can also matter how many other links are present on the same page. If a link is one among several hundreds on the same page, then it is, once again, less valuable than if it were one among only a few links on that same page.
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.
Link 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.
General Guideline
The rule of thumb for good backlink building is this: the more natural your backlink-profile looks, the better.
In other words, aim for diversity when you build backlinks. You can’t go wrong with links from different sites, using variations of anchor text and placed in different contexts on the sites.
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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For vital advice in the sphere of one way links – please make sure to study this web site. The times have come when concise information is truly at your fingertips, use this chance.
What NOT to include in your RESOURCE BOX:
1. A listing of every website you own. There is no faster way to dilute your credibility than by posting a half dozen irrelevant URLs that have nothing to do with each other. Best to only post ONE URL that is related to the topic of your article.
2. A listing of every accomplishment you’ve achieved to date. No one cares. Keep your resource box brief and to the point. Yes, your resource box should be benefit oriented so that the reader finds value in reading it rather than your ego being justified.