Saturday, August 21, 2010

The importance of backlinks

A backlink is one of the most important factors in determining the popularity of your website, and as such, its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

 Search engine optimization services realise this, and will do all they can to increase the number of backlinks to your site. Google’s method of measuring the relative importance of a web page is called Pagerank. In their overview of this system, they define a backlink as ‘a link from page

A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B’. Increasing the number of backlinks There are different ways to maximise the number of backlinks to your site. You may stumble upon a breaking news story, or it may involve lots of planning and marketing. One excellent way to do this is to provide insider industry information, then if you’re lucky, lots of other sites will provide a link to your page as they know their readers will be interested. If you’re very lucky, an authoritative site will provide a link to you, and this can drive your traffic through the roof and prove useful in the long term for your site.

 Anchor text – the labelling of a hyperlink as it appears on a webpage - is another crucial factor for building good quality backlinks. Web crawlers examine the anchor and compare it to the contents of your page. The more relevant it is, the higher your rankings on SERPs. SEO services understand this, and they can ensure that your page will not be stuffed with irrelevant anchor text which can affect your search engine results.