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This article covers all the basics you should know about back links for SEO. Getting back links to your web pages is an essential part of search engine optimization (particularly for Google). However, not all back links are equal. In this post, I describe the three things that matter most, in terms of back links. The 3 factors are: Number of back links, back link value and anchor text.
Here’s a short description explaining each of the three factors:
Quantity
This factor is very easy to understand. More back links = better. That’s the gist of it.
The thinking behind this is simply that every link to your site represents something like a “vote”. Someone linking to your site is basically saying: “Check this out, there’s something worth seeing there.”
And the more people are saying that there’s something worth seeing on your site, the better your site must be.
On a perfectly innocent Internet (what a weird concept), this would be all it takes to determine the rank of websites. There’s a lot of money to be made from high search engine positions for lucrative keywords, and therefore there are many people trying to game the system and get their sites to the top. It’s very easy to build back links for yourself, so just going by the number of back links would favor those sites that have very effective link-spamming mechanisms in place and that would not be ideal.
That’s why two more (main) factors come into play:
Link-Value
This is the most debated and most elusive factor determining website ranks. The simple truth is that no one, save for a few Google employees, knows exactly how back link-value is determined.
Here are a few things we can safely assume, however:
Size and Authority of Page
A link coming from a high authority website is more valuable than one coming from a low authority website. How the authority of the website is determined, is an entire subject of its own. For the purpose of this post, we can assume that the larger and more active (i.e. more visited) a site is, the higher it’s authority and conversely the greater the value of links coming from that site would be.
Obviously, a link coming from the front page of a huge news-site with millions of visitors is going to mean more in terms of SEO than a link coming from your cousin’s blog, which gets two views a week.
Link Placement
Where on a web page a link is located is also an important factor. For example, if a link is placed in the sidebar of a blog, it is slightly less valuable than if it’s placed inside the body content of the same blog. The same thing goes for links placed in comments. It can also matter how many other links are present on the same page. For example, if your link is just one among hundreds a page consisting mainly of links, then it’s not very valuable.
Back link Distribution
In a greater context, it also matters where your links are coming from. For example, if hundreds of links are all coming from the same domain or the same IP address, then they are not as valuable as if the same number of links were coming from lots of different domains and IP addresses.
Anchor text
Finally, the anchor text of your links is what determines which keywords you will rank for. For those who don’t know, the anchor text is the text you click on, to follow a link.
Search engines use anchor texts in part to determine what a site is about. If the majority of links pointing to a site have the anchor text “dog training”, then that’s what the site is probably about. However, you should avoid getting many backlinks that all have the identical anchor text, because this looks unnatural.
My personal recommendation is to use your targeted keyword as the anchor text in about 70% of the links you build, closely related terms in about 20% of the links and unrelated/general terms (like “click here”) in about 10% of the links.
Guideline
The general guideline for link-building is actually quite simple: You want the back links to look natural and not spammy or fake.
In other words, aim for diversity when you build back links. You can’t go wrong with links from different sites, using variations of anchor text and placed in different contexts on the sites.
Also, don’t shy away from getting links from low-authority sites. Just make sure you don’t spend too much time pursuing lower-value links.
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