Quality Backlinks

Today’s post, ‘Quality Backlinks‘, is a beginner’s guide to understanding what backlinks are and why you need them.  Basically, backlinks are the lifeblood of your site.  You need them because they are are one of the factors search engines use when considering where to rank your page in the results pages.

What Are Backlinks?

Essentially, backlinks (or Inbound Links) are links from other sites to your site.  Backlinks are simply votes for your site.  Wikipedia states that backlinks help give the search engines an indication of the popularity and importance of your site.

Why Do You Need Backlinks?

The more backlinks you have for a particular keyword, the greater your chances are of ranking highly in the search engine results pages, for that keyword.  However, the quantity of backlinks should not be your only concern.  Quality backlinks are what will drive your rankings.

Any backlinks for your site are a great thing.  However, quality backlinks are more valuable to you because they are linked using your anchor text, are highly relevant and are from authority sites in your particular niche.

What Are Quality Backlinks?

Anchor Text

Backlinks increase in value when they link back to your site using your anchor text.  The anchor text in your blog post is the clickable hyperlink which normally contains the keywords that you are trying to rank the page for in the search engine results pages.

If someone links to your site using your anchor text, it’s reinforces to the search engines what your page is about and helps boost your chances of having your page returned at the top of the search results for that particular keyword.

For example, let’s say I have a blog about cycling and I’ve written a post about the Tour de France.  My keywords (anchor text) for the post are Tour de France.

Any backlinks that link to my site using ‘Tour de France’ will strengthen the relevance of my page, for the search engines, when someone types in a query in a search box for the search term, ‘Tour de France’.  However, if someone had written in their post, that the reader could ‘click here’(click here is used as the anchor text) for more information on the ‘Tour de France’; this backlink, while still good is not a quality backlink because they did not use my anchor text,  ‘Tour de France’.

Relevance

Relevancy is also important. The search engines will look at the content of the site that is linking to you.  If the content of the site is highly relevant to your site; it again reinforces to the search engines the relevancy of your page for that particular keyword.

The more quality backlinks you have, the more the search engines will recognize your page as being an authority for that particular keyword, and the higher your site will rank.

If we use the cycling example from before; a quality backlink would be one from another site about cycling rather than a backlink from a music site.  Both backlinks would count but the one from the cycling site is a quality backlink because it  is highly relevant to my own site.

Importance

The search engines place a great deal of importance on where your backlinks come from.  Quality backlinks are those that come from an authority site, especially when it’s in your niche.

An authority site is one that has a high PageRank.  PageRank is a way for Google to determine how important any page on the internet is.  Basically, the greater the number of quality backlinks there are to a site; the higher the PageRank it has.  There are other factors to take into consideration and you can visit Wikipedia to learn more about PageRank.

The search engines regard backlinks from authority sites as being incredibly important because these sites have built up a great deal of reputation and trust with the community.  Authority sites will consider carefully who they choose to link to, so when they link to you, some of their reputation and trust is passed to you.

Backlinks from authority sites in your niche will strongly reinforce for the search engines the relevance of your page for your keywords.

Again, let’s use the cycling example.  A backlink from the official Tour de France site; ‘letour’; using my preferred anchor text, will be incredibly valuable because it will be considered as coming from an authority site in my niche.  The search engines will give more weight to a link from ‘letour’ than a link from a cycling site, even though that site is also in my niche.

Final Words on Quality Backlinks

The main things to remember about backlinks are that while the quantity of backlinks is important; you need to focus of getting quality backlinks.  Quality backlinks are those backlinks that are linked using your anchor text, are highly relevant, and are from authority sites in your particular niche.

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about quality backlinks.