SEO : Backlinks

To rank well in the search engines we need inbound links to our website from other sites.

The more links the better, especially if the links come from "authority" sites (sites with a PageRank of 5 or more).

Major engines like Google use the keywords contained in link text to give your site its ranking, so it is VITAL that the linked words match the search keywords that we want to rank well for.

ie. if there are 200 websites all with a link on the words "experimental cookery" pointing to our website, when anyone types in experimental cookery our site will be near the top. And if some of the some of those site have a PR rating of 5 or higher, we will most likely be #No.1

Examples

<a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com">click here</a> for a great source on cookery

which would read:

"click here for a great source on cookery" (linking & therefore optimizing the keywords "click here")

and

<a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com">click here for a great source on cookery</a>

which would read:

"click here for a great source on cookery" (optimizing keywords "click here" "source on cookery")

... but who is going to type in those phrases to find out site? What we really want to do is this:

<a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com">Cooking Today</a> - a great site for
<a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com/experimental-cuisine/">experimental cuisine</a> and
<a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com/cookery-for-beginners.asp">cookery for beginners</a>

which would read:

"Cooking Today - a great site for experimental cuisine and cookery for beginners "

Note: in the last example only the keywords that we want to be found on in searches are linked.
Also there are several links, one to the home page as well as deeper links to specific pages / directories.

Controlling the keywords used in backlinks

If you are to rank well inbound links MUST contain the right keywords.

The easiest way is contain a "link to us" section on your own website where you provide the link HTML or graphics, which hopefully webmasters will see and use.

But often it's a case of contacting the other webmaster and getting them on your side, by emailing them something like this:

hi,

I see that you've linked to our site - thank you. Great site by the way, particularly liked [ ... ... ... ].

Can you do me a quick favor? We're trying to rank better for certain keywords, and it would help us a lot if the link to our site read something like:

<a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com">Cooking Today</a> - a great site for
<a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com/experimental-cuisine/">experimental cuisine</a> and <a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com/cookery-for-beginners.asp">cookery for beginners</a>

I hope that's OK!

Thanks in advance,

[FIRSTNAME]

Chasing up webmasters link by link can be laborious and time consuming, but get into the hang of it - it is well worth it when you hit that #No.1 slot!

Relevancy

One of the key weighting factors used by search engines is how relevant is the linking website to our content.

If a car website links to our cookery website, it is a normal link.
But if a cookery website links to our cookery website it is a much better link.
And if the cookery website that is linking to our website has a page rank of 5 or higher, it's a great link!

Deep Linking

Try to ensure that many links link direct to pages within your site, as opposed to just the home page. This will appear more natural to the search engines.

NoFollow

Ensure that backlinks do not contain the "nofollow" attaibute, which looks like this:

<a href="http://www.thegreatcookerysite.com" rel="nofollow" >Cooking Today</a>

If a link has the nofollow bit in it a search spider will not follow it, so the link will not count toward your ranking score.

PageRank

The higher the Google PageRank (PR) of the external site linking to yours, the better your ranking wiill be.

To find out the PR value of a site, install the free Google Toolbar.

The goal is to get your page on as many PR3, PR4 and PR5 pages as possible. If you can also get a couple of PR6 & PR7 's you are virtually guaranteed a first page position in Google. This is because someone at Google wrote a rule to say that a popular site will only link to other interesting and popular content - otherwise people wouldn't visit it.

Text links v. Graphic links

As search engines read the ALT tag on the graphic and store it as link text, there is not difference between the two from a search engine ranking perspective. Therefore if you prefer to give people a nice graphic/logo that links back to your site, go for it!

To optimize the phrase cookery for beginners we would do something like this:

To rank well ensure your image filename is the same as your page keywords.

note: putting border="0" on your image tag will get rid of the blue border on the image caused by the hyperlink.

Do...

write your backlink text so you can link just your keywords
limit your linked words to 2 or 3, so that the search engine can perceive their pattern as a phrase
link the keywords to pages with the same name as your keywords (unless home page)
get backlinks from relevant sites
make sure image filenames and alt text are the same as your keywords
try to make sure links go deeper than just your home page
make this a regular activity, which you spend a certain amount of time every day doing (you can be sure your competitors are)

Don't...

link words which are not your keywords
underestimate the power of talking to people and counting on their goodwill - if you ask nicely.
buy backlinks - they get a bad reputation with search engines, which can damage your ranking!

www.google.com/webmasters - Google Webmaster Tools shows you your backlinks, backlink keywords, and associated information
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - Yahoo's site explorer is another excellent tool for backlink exploration (in particular of other people's websites so you can see where they get their links from)
http://toolbar.google.com - Google Toolbar shows you PageRank for your site and others, a must for anyone promoting their website