Backlinks: SEO Tips Explained

Backlinks.

You hear that word a lot in the world of internet marketing, webmasters and learning how to make money online.

So what precisely are backlinks, what are the best ways to use them and what pitfalls are there to avoid if you are going to get your websites to rank well on Google?

If you know what a ‘link’ or ‘hyperlink’ is on the Web, then most of those will be backlinks – if they link to another site. Backlinks are the dominant way that Google figures out which sites are relevant for which search terms.

Let’s say you own a site on golfing in Florida. Links from other sites on the Web to yours will feature some variation of ‘golfing in Florida’ in the ‘anchor text’. Anchor text is the specific words used in backlinks and Google uses the words of anchor text in backlinks to determine who’s relevant for what searches.

And Google does a pretty good job of figuring all this out.

So you want your golfing in Florida website to show up on Google Page 1. How do you do it?

Well apart from what are called ‘on-page’ SEO (Search Engine Optimization) factors in the way your site is set up, the most important factor is the number and quality of sites linking to yours with ‘golfing in Florida’ in the anchor text of those backlinks.

So how do you go about getting a significant quantity of backlinks to your site? What are the best SEO tips for that?

Google’s Search Quality team argue that just by having very good content on your site and creating a great ‘user experience’, other webmasters will ‘naturally’ link to yours and, over time, your presence on Google will continually improve.

However, in the Real World of time-poor webmasters (including me with over 40 sites in my portfolio, most on page 1), nobody ‘naturally’ links to anyone – if they ever did. Even if these ‘natural’ links occurred, you just wouldn’t get anywhere near enough backlinks to get in the vicinity of Page 1 on Google.

In some of my niches, I’m competing with sites that have tens of thousands of backlinks and you can be that they didn’t occur ‘naturally’.

And I can show you many sites that build literally millions of backlinks every year in order to do well in very competitive niches like insurance and credit cards.

What you need to do is understand that, like every other successful webmaster on the Web today, you will need to begin a systematic campaign of consistent linkbuilding where your backlinks featuring terms (that people are already using – discover this with the Google Keyword Tool) related to golfing in Florida, or whatever your niche or sub-niche is.

If you are serious about penetrating Google’s first page, you will simply not do it without embracing the SEO demands of a serious backlinking campaign.

About the Author

Terry Kyle is the author of The Backlinks Black Belt Report, the Webmaster of over 40 successful sites, author/editor of 2 books on Amazon and a great lover of Golden Retrievers.