Backlinks

Once your site is online, I believe your goals should be:

1 to get traffic to your site

2 to convert that traffic (into customers and/or fans) &

3 to get them to return

Now, each goal is as important as each other and there are many, many sites dedicated to each of them. However, this section is about linking, an important component of getting traffic to your site. You see, part of how the search engines rank you, is how popular your site is i.e. how many people link to you, called getting backlinks.

If you were to want to go to CNN.com, you could type "CNN" into any search engine and, without doubt, there at the top of the search engine listings would be CNN.com.

In fact, when I just searched "CNN" in Google, all 5 of the top 5 listings were for various main pages in the CNN site:

home page
weather
international
world news &
money

At Yahoo they have all 10 of the top 10 listings...and 77 off the first 80 listings! Why is that?

Well, the reason is that many, many sites and blogs across the internet hyperlink (see wikipedia) those individual pages.

In an equal world one could say that the reason that CNN are at the top of the Google's listings is because more links point to them than any other page claiming to be about CNN.

While that may be true in CNN's case, it isn't necessarily so for other pages, because the search engines grade where the link is coming from and judge its "authority" accordingly.

A few links from authority sites could equal hundreds from lesser sites. Google names that "authority" Page Rank.

Those hyperlinks are called backlinks and if your website, web page or blog are hyperlinked to, especially by sites of high page rank, it will probably be rewarded by higher search engine listings and consequently, more traffic.

Anchor Text

The actual words that are hyperlinked are called the Anchor Text and in the past, at least, they were incredibly important e.g.

if your website was about birds and
your page was about eagles

...and you had somebody linking to the eagles page with the lead up as:

"...here's a great..." followed by anchor text saying "...eagles page", that would be great anchor text, because it contained your keyword. Unfortunately, most of the time, anchor text says "click here"!

As a result, SEO gurus suggested manipulating the anchor text to suggest that the webmaster linking to you always use a keyword, which is well, un-natural. My guess, is that the anchor text, while still important, is less so than it was and the preceding sentence (or paragraph), the lead-up to the anchor text may soon become inportant as well.

N.B. I'm not denying the anchort text's importance, merely questioning exactly how much importance it still has. However, there's still some merit in varying anchor text using a mathematical prediction.

Deep Linking

In the example above, the link coming in to your eagles page is deep linking because it's not going to your home-page but us instead directed at one of your site's internal pages. The more deep links you have, the merrier.

A whole industry has grown up around gaining backlinks and I'm presenting what I believe to be the best resources for this very important part of living on the web:

1 SEO Elite In 2004 & 2005, SEO Elite was the hottest piece of internet marketing software in the world and much of the copy (and over 500 testimonials) relate to that time. While it's no longer cutting edge, it's still very useful and can still find you excellent backlinks.

2 Directory Submitter Having created your site, it's a very good policy to have it listed in directories, as each listing will provide a backlink. Directory Submitter is a FREE piece of software from Bryxen, the makers of SEO Elite, which will semi-automate that process.

3 Article Marketing has really taken off in the last few years. It's a great way to get backlinks if you have something of quality to say, because most articles being published are, well, crap!

4 Press Releases If you're prepared to pay for the service, press releases can provide excellent backlinks and ongoing traffic from search engines

5 Create a buzz or be controversial either on the net (e.g. attack the status quo in relevant forums) or in the real world. If it's interesting, you'll get good, bad and indifferent links back to your site, quickly.

That's good for you, because the search engines don't care (right now) and see all links as good links (see the bottom of the page).

If the buzz is interesting enough, contact your local paper and if they run the story, do a press release for it.

6 You can purchase textlinks from brokers or even on eBay for a monthly fee, usually. Many SEOs use this but I think it's asking for trouble and don't really advise it.

N.B.: Matt Cutts Google's unofficial spokesman wrote in his blog about purchasing links, September 2005

Matt Cutts Google's unofficial spokesman on purchasing links,

with SEO guru, Danny Sullivan, SMX Advanced 2007

Also: H0bbel, a blogger writes about his experiences with a textlink broker getting snippy when he "...(added) a simple nofollow to the links would then indicate to the mighty GoogleBot that I don’t want to transfer any Page Rank to the advertisers..."

Translation: indicate to Google that the ad he bought was for traffic only, not to artificially gain page rank. July 2007