SEO - Backlinks Serve Different Purposes

In search engine optimization (SEO), one of the most important things to do is acquire backlinks. Backlinks are simply inbound links from other websites to your website. These are important for many reasons, but did you know that backlinks can serve different purposes? Below I will discuss the most important purposes for acquiring backlinks.

Indexing Frequency

Often people are so focused on how to obtain one-way links in order to boost a site's Page Rank (PR) that they forget a very important purpose behind the backlink. Indexing frequency relates to how often a search engine spider visits a site. The only proven method for creating more frequent visits by spiders is to have lots of inbound links. As most people know, the search engines come to your site by following links from other sites. The more links you have coming from other sites, the more often they will come. Therefore, with regards to indexing frequency, the more total links one has the more often the spiders will come. What this means is that there is still reason to get as many "whatever" links as possible. They don't have to be related, or one-way. Unrelated reciprocal links that are 'follow-able' will serve this purpose well. That is not to say this is all you need to do. (SIDEBAR - Watch out for 'no-follow' links. These are useless because the SE spider will not follow it. It serves no purpose for SEO. Always maintain your list of links and keep an eye the ones that CHANGE to no-follow later. This is the new trick; offer do-follow links at first, then change them to no-follow later.)

Page Rank

This concept is often misunderstood. Google is the only search engine for which page rank matters at all. The key thing to understand is that Page Rank has little to do with where the site will rank on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It is rather a cumulative ranking based on other sites that link to your site. Page Rank affects page rank. The more higher-page-rank sites link to you, the higher your page rank can get. But... so what? This doesn't directly impact your SERPs. However, to build page rank you need to find quality one-way links that have high page rank. So for this purpose, specifically targeted links are necessary.

SERPs

For the previous two purposes, related content is not very important. It is, however, extremely important with regards to SERPs. This has to do with where your site ranks in the search engine for specific keywords. It is the ultimate goal of SEO in the first place. Having good links from sites with related content affects SERPs more than anything else with regard to linking. Having one-way, contextual links work best for this purpose. A link coming from an "Authority" site of related content is supreme. Never mind all those offers to submit you to 1200 directories, or get 1000 blog comments and social bookmarks for you. That sort of rubbish "may" help with indexing-frequency, but certainly not SERPs. Only high quality links from related content sites will truly help your ultimate goal of stable SERPs top positions. Such links are definitely not easy to get, but only a few of these can make a great difference.

So, when evaluating your SEO link campaign, you have to understand that you can do many things as long as you understand the purpose of what you are doing. Acquiring lots of random directory links and reciprocal links will increase spider visits. Seeking out high Page Rank sites will help improve your site's Page Rank. And finally, acquiring valuable one-way related content links from established websites will help improve your SERPs. That's all there is to it; easy, right? Not really.