Back links – the sledge hammers of search engine optimisation
September 8, 2009 by RSS
Filed under Marketing Information
Before putting any effort whatsoever into creating any web pages you should have considered how you intend to get people to visit and ‘consume’ your content. Whether your website is commercial or not then sooner or later you are going to want to attract visitors. You need a significant proportion of your traffic to come from the search engines. The best type of visitor traffic comes from search engines as it’s free and it’s targeted.
Search engines stay in business by understanding what the user are searching for and delivering relevant results. The delivery of relevant and accurate results to searchers is the key objective for search engines and is a major factor is maintaining and increasing user loyalty. The more often the searchers return the greater the search engines fortunes. You and your web pages face a similar challenge.Persuade users to come back to your web pages over and over again.
So how do you do this?. There are two paths to achieving this and the good news is you can if you have the money do both. You can write useful and relevant content or you can use the advertising methods offered by search engines and other properties.
As far as all of the search engines are concerned nothing exists on the internet without a keyword or a key phrase. Search engines perform searches based upon the keyword or key phrase entered by the user. The search engine goes and looks in its vast index of web pages and selects the most relevant web pages and then returns them in a list that is ordered in terms of relevance and authority. Search engines use relevance and authority to decide what pages get returned and presented to the searcher.
Relevance means the page contains the keywords and authority means the page has back links to it from other web pages. The profile in terms of authority and the volume of back links are used by the search engines in deciding the position or ranking of a web page in the list of search results.
Back links are the most important factor in optimising your pages for the search engines.
Back links have two important properties their ability to influence your page ranking and their ability to bring traffic to your site from places on the Internet. People searching for and reading relevant content will click on the back links that contain text related to their quest and subsequently be directed to your web pages. ‘Anchor text’ is the correct term to describe the text appearing as a link and contributes to the value given to the link by the search engines. Some back links have more value than others.
Back links from pages with authority in eyes of the search engine can pass authority onto your web pages.Significantly authoritative web pages can pass some of their authority through the back links to your page.
