Backlinks and SEO

When you first start to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you learn what changes you need to make on your page. This includes things like choosing a keyword and including it in the title of your page and within an H-tag on your site for example. That's a great place to start, but there is one more important part of SEO that you need to be aware of and that's backlinks.

What Are Backlinks

Backlinks are links that point from other websites back to your own. For example, if you look at the very end of this article, you will see a blue underlined link that says "link building program" it links back to one of my own websites and is thus a backlink for me.

Backlinks are important for a couple of different reasons. The first one is traffic. Links allow readers to move from one website to another. Chances are that you clicked on a link somewhere (either on the main part of this website or on a search results page) to get to the article you are reading now. Links are what connects all these various pages and help us get from Page A to Page B.

But it doesn't stop there. Backlinks are also very important in SEO as we'll see in a minute. In fact, they are the second most important factor when it comes to ranking your content in Google, right after the title tag.

Backlinks And SEO - Keyword Rich Anchor Text

Once you've figured out what keyword you want your page to rank for and have included it in the title tag of your page, start building backlinks that include the same keyword as part of the anchor text. Anchor text, by the way, is the text that's underlined to form the link. Looking at the example at the end of this article again, "link building program" is the anchor text for this link.

The words in the anchor text play a big part in what the page the link is pointing to will rank for which is why I recommend you use your keywords as much as possible.

Backlinks and SEO - Authority and Link Juice

Links will also pass along authority and link juice. The stronger and more authoritative the page the link is coming from is, the more the backlink will help with your SEO. For example, a blog post on an authoritative blog that links back to your site will help a lot more than a directory listing on some small website directory on an obscure category page buried deep within the site.

Whenever you can, focus on building strong, authoritative backlinks that include your keywords in the anchor text.