If you have come upon this article, then you likely will fall into one of the following three categories
1) You have a website and are wondering how you can get visitors
2) You have a website and have read somewhere about using backlinks to build traffic but you’re not sure what that is or what to do about that
3) Other (what a cop-out for me eh?)
Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this article I will first explain what a backlink is, how it is used to get more visitors to your website, and then a brief summary of the tried and true methods to build backlinks
WHAT IS A BACKLINK?
A backlink is simply a link to your website. If someone out there in internet-land links to your website, that is a backlink.
HOW DOES A BACKLINK DRIVE TRAFFIC?
There are two ways it drives traffic: direct traffic and search engine traffic.
The first way is that anyone who sees your link may click on it to visit your site. That is what I mean by direct traffic.
The second way is the search engine way. The more links you have out there pointing to your site, the more search engines will think your site is important and it will rank you higher for various search terms people type in. This is a good thing.
Let’s put examples behind these two methods:
Let’s say you have a website about dog training. In the first method: A user may go to a website where the author has put a link to your site. This user may click on that link and visit your website. In the second method: A user may type in the words “dog training” in a search engine like Google or Yahoo. The higher your page is listed, the more likely they will click on your link and visit your website
HOW DOES A SEARCH ENGINE USE BACKLINKS?
Way before search engine optimization was even its own acronym and when netscape and mosaic were the only browsers out there, websites were such a novel thing. The technology was new and exciting and when people found very cool sites they were quick to put a link to them for technology sake.
Then came the search engines. And crawling and spidering. Search engines started paying attention to this, seeing which pages got a lot of links. As the algorithm got more defined, it paid attention to the type of page providing the link. The more popular that page was, the more “juice” that link had.
Then the algorithms started paying to “anchor text” used by a link. In the old days when we web junkies were just happy to see the technology to link we would use “click here” as anchor text to tell people to click on those words to go somewhere else. Then different anchor text started being used (which helped search engines a lot), such as “Dog Training Manual”
Instead of using
CLICK HERE for a great Dog Training Manual
People now use
Click here for a great DOG TRAINING MANUAL
Search engines started utilizing these anchor texts and giving weight to them so that if a website got a large number of links with anchor text “Dog Training Manual” it would then rank them higher whenever someone searched the words “Dog Training Manual”.
So the key points to the value of a backlink: the anchor text used with the link and the “quality” or “authority” of the page providing the link. And algorithms continue to evolve and give weight to many other factors but this is enough to get you started.
Now that you understand what a backlink is and how backlinks are used to drive traffic, you need to know how to properly build them to drive as much traffic as possible to your site.
Keep an eye out for part two of this article series: how to create a backlink and how to properly build large amounts of backlinks to get as much traffic as possible!
Thanks!
Emil
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