For any web page to be ‘ranked’ in the search engines and receive traffic it’s critical it has backlinks. To understand backlinks there are three things you need to consider, the source 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 number of backlinks
The volume of backlinks to a page is one of the key properties 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 searchers to the page to which it points. But ‘votes’ cast via backlinks from trusted or authoritative pages to a page have greater influence over the search engines perception of this page than backlinks originating 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 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 normally has a label a word or text associated with the information 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 first principle for most search engine software and it follows if the information on the page is about ‘drying chillis” then it is from a search engine’s point of view, 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 issues
The majority people screw up their backlinks strategies because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. Having a large amount of backlinks to your page doesn’t necessarily mean the search engines will consider your page as relevant.
How to create backlinks
So here is my no obligation guidance for getting backlinks to your pages, good visibility in the search engine results pages and the right type of traffic to your site.