The Backlinks guide for idiots

Written by ama on December 13th, 2009 in Get Paid To, Money Exchange, Money Investing, Money Making, Money Survey, Money Transfer, Money Tutorial, Quick Money, Uncategorized.

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back links

Often referred to as inbound links, backlinks are the sledgehammer of search engine positioning and traffic generation. Backlinks have three key elements, 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 amount of backlinks

Most search engines appraise the amount of backlinks to a page when deciding where this page should appear in the search results.

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 through 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 less ‘trust’ or authority. Obvious examples of trusted sources of backlinks carrying higher authority are pages in education (.edu) and government (.gov) web sites..

Google Page Rank

Google has the notion of ‘page rank’, this is the property it attributes to a page it considers to have a history of accumulating authority from backlinks..

The ‘anchor text’

When you see a backlink on a web page it often has a label a word or text related to the content 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 information related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.

Common issues

A significant number of people undermine their backlinks building activities because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. Having a substantial volume of backlinks to your page doesn’t necessarily mean the search engines will see your page as relevant.

How to build backlinks

So let me share with you my fail safe method for acquiring backlinks that will make the search engines take notice of you and bring quality and appropriate visitors to your web site.

To begin with you should focus on selecting the correct keywords.
I like to build a keyword ‘cloud’.
You should always start by identifying a key word or phrase which has a a constant and high amount of traffic.
To find out how much visitor traffic is being generated by searches for my primary keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
The Google tool presents a list of keywords connected to my main keyword and from this list I build my cloud.
Using this cloud I generate a selection of content containing articles, videos and blog posts each with backlinks labeled with the appropriate anchor text and then use a portfolio of content distribution tools to disperse my materials to a group of directories.
My golden rule is to write content that will attract traffic and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my target pages as well as send backlinks.