Backlinks
OMG! Backlinks… where do I begin?
A ‘backlink’ is simply a link on another page or site somewhere out there on the interwebs that will take a web surfer directly to YOUR site when it gets clicked.
The actual text that draws the visitor’s attention and gets clicked on is called the anchor text. This is usually one of your key words or an LSI word related to the page being linked to.
The backlink concept is a very simple one which is the basis for nearly all traffic since the first days of the internet.
Generally, backlinks will be of one of two varieties:
- those which are naturally acquired, and
- those which are engineered by you
Google itself was founded on the idea that internet users who bookmark and backlink to their favorite sites would collectively select the most popular (i.e. ‘best’) sites for any given topic as indicated by the sheer numbers of natural links. They figured they could present those sites as search results, declare victory and move on.
Of course, it wasn’t long before some webmasters realized that they could engineer their own fortunes by creating backlinks on their own… on a massive scale. This was the beginning of what it is known today as search engine optimization, SEO for short.
As you can imagine, Google was none too pleased with this development. They even went so far as to call these webmasters criminals! Excuse me, but who made Google the internet police and bestowed them with the power to create their own laws and convict hard working marketers of ‘criminal’ activity? That’s absurd!
The algorithms used to select search engine results evolved and although backlinks remain and important component of SEO, we are talking about backlinks as a traffic strategy here. Think about it. Every single backlink floating around out there has the potential to send visitors to your site! They have intrinsic value whether or not they contribute to your site’s rankings in the search engines.
So, how can we engineer backlinks to drive traffic to our site? Where should we place those backlinks?
Obviously, a backlink is more valuable when found on a page that is seen most often. In other words, to maximize our results we should place backlinks on popular, high traffic sites. However, let’s not ignore the fact that a scuba equipment site is not likely to bring suitable traffic to a jewelry store no matter how popular it is with the scuba crowd. The traffic from a scuba equipment site simply is not targeted to products offered by a jewelry store.
So, we need to look for popular sites which have lots of traffic that is targeted to what we have to offer. Then, it is a simple matter of getting our backlink on that site and waiting for the visitors to come through the door. The more backlinks we have, the more likely someone will find one and click on one. But, relevancy is king when it comes to link building. Always remember that. Be sure your link is in the right place with the right anchor text.
We have already seen the power of Social Bookmarking. We used it to get our site listed in the search engines. Please re-visit the method with a view towards the traffic it can send to you.
Before you go out and start building backlinks you must remember that Google is constantly updating its algorithm in order to root out the people who are trying to game their system by ranking sites throwing thousands of backlinks to them and not providing quality content to its users.
Of course, that’s not you, and at this point you can’t be bothered with what Google likes or doesn’t like. They are much too fickle to worry about, BUT… there are other search engines out there! (Yeah, I know… a shocker. Right?)
Well, they don’t like to see ‘unnatural’ activity either. You must always keep this in mind when you are building backlinks to your site (always think long term). Try not to do things that will look unnatural or that can be easily detected as link spamming by the search engines.
There are 3 things you must know about to avoid this:
1. Link diversity
2. Anchor text diversity
3. Link velocity
Link Diversity.
When you have backlinks coming from web 2.0 properties, blog posts, article directories, video sharing sites, press releases, directories, forums and other different types of web properties, you have a diverse portfolio of links.
A small number of diverse backlinks is better than a large number of backlinks coming from the same sites.
How natural do you think it looks when a website has 500 backlinks all coming from forum profiles? Not very natural at all, this screams out “I WANT TO GAME YOUR SYSTEM!!” very clearly.
Never rely on only one source of backlinks!
Anchor Text Diversity.
Keeping your backlinks as natural as possible is very important. How natural do you think it looks when the backlinks to a website all have the same anchor text? Not very natural at all, again, this
screams out “I WANT TO GAME YOUR SYSTEM!!” very clearly.
So always vary the anchor text of your backlinks by using the other keywords you are targeting on your site or some LSI keywords in a 4:1 ratio (for every 4 backlinks with your main keyword you must build 1 with your LSI’s)
Link Velocity.
Link velocity refers to the speed and consistency at which you build your backlinks. How natural do you think it looks when suddenly a website gets 300 backlinks in a couple of days then nothing for the next 3 weeks? Not very natural at all, once more, this screams out “I WANT TO GAME YOUR SYSTEM!!” very clearly.
Build your links as evenly as possible over a period of time. PLAN your campaigns, know how many links you want and from where, how many per week, at what speed, and replicate it, increase it, bring it back down, and balance it out.
And don’t worry about building hundreds of backlinks, because if you did your keyword research right you are building sites around low competition keywords, so if you have your on-page factors in place you won’t need a lot of backlinks to rank well, that is if and when you actually try to rank.
Another thing that doesn’t look natural is having all your backlinks pointing only to your home page. Remember to always build backlinks to your internal pages also, but not to EVERY page.
It’s time to look at some sources of backlinks beyond simple social bookmarking. next.
