Backlinks explained

Backlinks are links coming into a website from another website or web page, in the early days of the Internet before the birth of the Search engines, back links were the most popular way to navigate the web. Today the main importance of backlinks are for SEO.  Backlinks are also sometimes called inward links, inbound links, inlinks, incoming links, and SEO links.

Search engine rankings

Search engines count the number of backlinks that a website contains, this count goes towards helping determine the rank the website should receive. Google has built a rank system called PageRank allow though Google has stated it no longer views page rank as a major ranking factor the page rank of any website or webpage is still active today and can be viewed either by using Mozilla Firefox Resource 1 and installing the Google Page Rank Toolbar plugin, Resource 2 or by simply using a online service found by searching on the term whats my page rank.

Google Page Rage is briefly explained by Google themselves  as “When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a web page by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data.” . Source 1

Simply using the amount of backlinks a site has to determine rankings, could be and was easily manipulated, Blackhat SEO was born. Explantion 1 Website owners simply needed to build a large number of inbound links from any site they could get backlinks from and so the term link spamming was born, link spamming is the practice of placing 100s if not 1000s of link backs to a website usually automatically, commenting on blogs is one of the most popular methods of link spamming. Search engines realized they had to change the system of one link one vote, the Search engines response to link spamming was to introduce a ranking of each back link, each linkback is now checked for against several filters such as the amount of outbound links on the page that the back link is found, the relevance of the content on the page and website that the back link is found on.

Other factors that help to determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authoritative sites where the content matches  in terms of relevance to the site that the linkback is placed to will carry the most weight and have the most influence on search engine rankings. As the sites are already considered authoritative sites by the Search Engines they are trusted to not just place backlinks that link to poor quality sites.

A rough guide to the way in which the way in which backlinks differ is below , please bear in mind there is also different levels of quality of each of these levels of back links also.

We work on theory of adding at least £10 worth of backlinks a day.

Level 1  High Authority site + Relevance       £2.50

Level 2 High Authority + No Relevance         £1.00

Level 3 Relevant + No Authority                      £0.50

Level 4 No Relevance + No Authority            £0.10

So the fastest way to get to the £10 a day level would be to add four level one links and slowest ways would be to add one hundred Level four links. The important thing to remember is that Google  as well as the other search engines can see how many links are coming to your site, once you start backlinking it is very important to continue building up back links.

Anchor text to link on

Another important rule of backlinking is to make sure that your link has is placed on anchour text, example for our site here one of main phrases is SEO Manchester this is far better than simply linking on http://www.uberseomanchester.com , try typing your domain into Google and your site will automatically come out on top as domains are direct addresses. Another poor anchor text commonly used is read more on Google.co.uk there are About 548,000,000 results for the phrase read more,ranking on this term for 99.9% of site would be of very little value.

Search Engines bots (crawlers, spiders, robots) read the anchor text and check how relevant it is to the content on page, so if we were looking to place a linkback on the term SEO Manchester we would want the rest of the content to be ideally about SEO in Manchester, or to a lesser extent Generally about SEO or Manchester. Backlinks placed on pages where both the site is authoritative and the content is highly relevant have the greatest impact on search engine results page (SERP) rankings of a webpage with respect to any given keyword query by a search engine user.

Working out what phrases your potential customers search on is crucial to ensure you are fully maximising your return on any SEO campaign.

Warning building too many backlinks of a short period of time can bring a penalty from the Search Engines and if the quality of the backlinks is very bad then they could even get a website de-indexed AKA Banned for SERPS altogether.

Source 1 Google Corporate Page Resource 1 and 2 Firefox and  Google PageRank Toolbar