What are Backlinks?
In layman's terms, there are two types of links: inbound and outbound.
Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site, while
inbound links or backlinks, come from an external site to yours.
e.g. if cnn.com links to yourdomain.com, the link from cnn.com is a
backlink (inbound) for yourdomain.com, however the link is an outbound
link from cnn.com's perspective. Backlinks are among the main building
blocks to good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Why Backlinks Are Important
The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance
of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search
engines like Google, give more credit to websites that have a large
number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant
than others in their results pages for a search query.
Therefore, when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a
keyword, they not only consider the number of backlinks to that site but
also their quality. In order to determine the quality, a search engine
considers the content of the sites. When backlinks to your site come
from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site,
these backlinks are considered more relevant to your site. If backlinks
are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less
relevant. The higher the relevance of backlinks, the greater their
quality.
For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned
dogs, and received a backlink from another website about dogs, then that
would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link
from a site about car racing. Therefore, higher the relevance of the
site linking back to your website, the better the quality of the
backlink.
Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for
natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to modify
your webpages to make them more SEO friendly it is a lot harder for you
to influence other websites and get them to link to your website. This
is the reason search engines regard backlinks as a very important
factor. Further, search engine's criteria for quality backlinks has
gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve
these backlinks by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as hidden
links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide
backlinks to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are
not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could
get your site banned entirely.
Anchor Text
When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we
call this anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the most
powerful resources a webmaster has.
Backlinks from multiple websites with the anchor text "orphaned dogs"
would help your website rank higher for the keyword "orphaned dogs".
Using your keyword is a superior way to utilize a hyperlink as against
having links with words like "click here" which do not relate to your
website. The 'Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool'
is a tool which will assist you find your backlinks and the text which
is being used to link to your website. If you find that your site is
being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being
utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor
text to something which incorporates relevant keywords. This will also
help boost your rankings.
Ways to Build Backlinks
Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome.
1 The Backlink Builder Tool
When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of relevent sites from where you might get some backlinks.
2 Getting Listed in Directories
If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in
directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must, not only because this is a
way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way
you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors.
Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is
that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed
in the categories of your choice.
3 Forums and Article Directories
Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is
also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If
the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However,
in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or
even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also,
sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are
relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a
rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines
from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.
4 RSS Feeds
You can offer RSS feeds to interested sites for free, when the other
site publishes your RSS feed you will get a backlink to your site and
potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more
details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.
5 Affiliate programs
Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers)
and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way
because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30
%. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get
some more quality backlinks?
6 News Announcements and Press Releases
Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an
approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many
sites that publish news announcements and press releases for free or for
a small fee . A professionally written press release about an important
event can bring you many visitors and the backlink from a respected
site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is
that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy.
That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a
commodity way to build backlinks.
Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided
There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal
linking. In the past few Google updates, reciprocal links were one of
the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had
agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's
rankings. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website
that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of
these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while
the irrelevant backlinks were ignored, the outbound links still got
counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a
great many websites to drop off the Google map.
There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the
popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site
is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you
could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad
apple.
Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are
related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about
interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related
websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt
you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do
something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in
this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is
referred to as backlink bombing.
One thing is certain, interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search
engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites
in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra
resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide
visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many
instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or
two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you.