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This post covers the most important basics you need to know about backlinks. Acquiring as many backlinks as possible is one of the most important search engine optimization factors – particularly Google pays a lot of attention to the amount of links pointing to a site. However, not all backlinks are equal. In this post, I describe the three things that matter most, in terms of backlinks. These three factors are: Amount, value and anchor text.

Here’s a short description explaining each of the three factors:

Amount

The first factor is very simple. More backlinks means higher rankings. As a rule of thumb, at least.

The thinking behind this is simply that every link to your site represents something like a “vote”. After all, people tend to link to things that they like and that they recommend to others.
And the more recommendations, in the form of inbound links, a site is getting from others all around the net, the better we can assume it’s content is.

On a perfectly innocent Internet (what a weird concept), this would be all it takes to determine the rank of websites. There’s a lot of money to be made from high search engine positions for lucrative keywords, and therefore there are many people trying to game the system and get their sites to the top. It’s very easy to build backlinks for yourself, so just going by the number of backlinks would favour those sites that have very effective link-spamming mechanisms in place and that would not be ideal.

That’s why two more (main) factors come into play:

Worth

It’s actually impossible to accurately determine the value of any single link and there’s lots of debate about this subject. The value of any given backlink is dependent on many different variables and no one, apart from a few engineers at Google, knows exactly how link value is determined.

Here are a few things we can safely assume, however:

Size and Authority of Page
A link coming from a high authority website is more valuable than one coming from a low authority website. How the authority of the website is determined, is an entire subject of its own. You can assume that the more traffic a website is getting, the more people are participating on that website and the higher the Google PR of that website is, the more valuable a link from it will be.

Obviously, a link coming from the front page of a huge news-site with millions of visitors is going to mean more in terms of SEO than a link coming from your cousin’s blog, which gets two views a week.

Link Placement
Where on a web page a link is located is also an important factor. For example, if a link is placed in the sidebar of a blog, it is slightly less valuable than if it’s placed inside the body content of the same blog. The same thing goes for links placed in comments. The context, and number of other links on the same page also play a part. For example, if your link is just one among hundreds a page consisting mainly of links, then it’s not very valuable.

Link Distribution
In a greater context, it also matters where your links are coming from. For example, if hundreds of links are all coming from the same domain or the same IP address, then they are not as valuable as if the same number of links were coming from lots of different domains and IP addresses.

Link Anchor Text

Last but not least, the anchor text of links pointing to your site has a great influence in which keywords the site will rank for. For those who don’t know, the anchor text is the text you click on, to follow a link.

The anchor text of your backlinks help the search engine spiders decide which keywords to rank your page for. Ideally, you want to get many backlinks that have your targeted keyword as their anchor text. However, you should avoid getting many backlinks that all have the identical anchor text, because this looks unnatural.

For the links you build yourself, I recommend using your keywords in the anchor text in most cases, related keywords in some cases, and something completely unrelated (e.g. “Click here”) in a few cases.

Guideline

The general guideline for link-building is actually quite simple: You want the backlinks to look natural and not spammy or fake.

In other words, aim for diversity when you build backlinks. Links coming from different sites, different IP addresses and featuring different anchor texts make for a good, natural looking link profile.
It also doesn’t hurt to get some links from low-authority sites and smaller blogs etc. Just make sure you don’t spend too much time pursuing lower-value links.

More on this subject: Article spinning software reviewed.  —  Article Spinning Tactics

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• How To Correlate Keywords With Internet Marketing (understandingecommerce.com)
• 7 Steps to Find a Website’s Page Rank and the Number of Backlinks (understandingecommerce.com)
• Improve Backlinks recognition with Relevant Links (plusstuff.com)
• Web Optimization: Get Noticed Or Get Bust (understandingecommerce.com)

Related posts:

1. Get More Backlinks Using These Three Techniques
2. Webmaster Linking Guide
3. Anchor text basics
4. 7 Steps to Find a Website’s Page Rank and the Number of Backlinks
5. Tips in Generating High PR Backlinks to Your Website