Website Marketing Skills For Small Businesses

For any web page to be ‘ranked’ in the search engines and attract visitors it’s essential it has backlinks. When thinking about backlinks there are three elements you need to consider, the source from which the backlinks are derived, the anchor text of the backlinks and what’s on the page to which the backlinks directs the visitor to.

The amount of backlinks

Just about all of the search engines count the amount of backlinks to a page when deciding where this page should be displayed in the search results.

The source of the backlinks

The pages from which backlinks originate pass ‘authority’ and visitors to the page to which the backlinks point. So it follows that pages with backlinks from ‘trusted pages will receive fairer consideration from the search engines. Pages from sources such as educational (.edu) or government (.gov) sites naturally posess more trust and authority.

Google Page Rank

Backlinks from web pages with high page rank (an attribute given by Google to any page that it has observed over a period to have attracted, sustained and continued to accumulate relevant backlinks) pass some of their page rank via the backlink to the target page.

The ‘anchor text’

Just like a label, the backlink anchor text has influence over the search engines valuation of the backlink. If the content of the page is about ‘parenting’ and the backlink on the page is labeled or given the ‘anchor’ text ‘parenting’ then the search engines consider this to be of more value to the searcher looking for web pages related to ‘parenting’ than if the backlink was labeled ‘babycare’.

Common issues

The majority people undermine their backlinks building activities because they fixate on quantity as opposed to quality of backlinks. For example if the volume of your backlinks to your ‘parenting’ page come from pages not related to ‘parenting’ then whilst you have backlinks they will almost always bring you the wrong traffic.

How to create backlinks

So let me tell you my no nonsense method for acquiring backlinks that will make the search engines love you and bring the right type and relevant traffic to your web pages.

1. To begin with you should focus on choosing the right keywords.
2. Your objective should be to end up with a keyword cloud.
3. I most often start with a single ‘top’ level keyword or key phrase which has substantial visitor traffic.
4. To work out how much visitor traffic is being coming from searches for my top level keyword I use the Google keyword analyzer tool.
5. I carefully consider words and search phrases associated with my primary phrase and create my ‘cloud’.
6. I then put together content in the form of articles and videos with backlinks with the right ‘anchor text’ to my ‘money’ or ‘target’ page and send these to the various directories.
7. My golden rule is to write content that will attract traffic and persuade them to follow the backlinks to my money pages as well as send backlinks.