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Often referred to as inbound links, backlinks are the oxygen of search engine positioning and traffic generation. 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 sends the visitor to.
The number of backlinks
The majority of search engines count the amount of backlinks to a page when deciding where this page should be displayed in the search results.
The origin of the backlinks
The pages from which backlinks originate pass ‘authority’ and visitors to the page to which the backlinks point. But ‘votes’ passed via backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines consideration of this page than backlinks originating from pages with lower ‘trust’ or authority. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are prime examples of sites that are authoritative and trustworthy.
Google Page Rank
Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (an attribute awarded by Google to a page that it has observed 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’
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 attribute to the link. Relevance is the guiding principle for most search engine mechanisms and therefore if the information on the page is about ‘drying chillis” then it is from a search engine’s perspective, more valuable for the backlink’s anchor text to this page to contain the word ‘chilli’ as opposed to a related term such as ‘drying spices’.
Common problems
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 a significant number of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come from sites not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost certainly bring you the wrong traffic.
How to manufacture backlinks
So here is my tried and tested guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, high rankings in the search engine results pages and quality traffic to your site: