How to Increase Website Traffic

The majority of people involved in SEO, or search engine optimization, agree that there are two crucial factors in gaining a top search engine position. These two factors are content, or your site, and backlinks, or links from other people's sites that lead back to your website. This article will help you understand how to easily gain search engine positions through having a proper backlink building strategy.The first thing that you need to understand is what a backlink is and how it works. Basically a backlink is when another website or web page puts a link up leading to you. Search engines, such as Google, use this to measure your site's importance; the more people that link to you the more important your site must be and therefore the higher it should rank in search engine results. However, there are many factors that make a backlink more or less powerful so it is important that you learn these in order to run a proper backlink building campaign and realize the kind of results that you are looking for.

The following are the factors that determine the power of a backlink which should be taken into account in order to save you time and allow you to build the strongest backlinks possible. These are in no particular order so you simply want backlinks with as many of these qualities as possible.

Authority of the site/page

A backlink will be more powerful if it comes from a higher authority website and beyond this a higher authority web page. This means that a backlink coming from a website such as TSA.gov will be more powerful than one coming from mydiary.blogspot.com. In addition to this you should try to find authority pages within the website to place you link on; a good way to measure this is by checking Google's assigned PageRank value of the website, with 10 being the most powerful and 0 being the least powerful.

Outbound Links

Another factor used to determine the strength of a backlink is the number of outbound links on the page where your backlink appears. The more sites that are linked to from this page the weaker your backlink will be. Think of it as the page having a certain weight, the more links the more this weight is divided up.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text attached to your backlink; basically making a word clickable and linking back to your website. You want the anchor text to be the keyword or phrase that you are targeting in search engine results. Doing so makes you appear more relevant for this term. Having no or irrelevant anchor text makes your backlink weaker.

DoFollow/NoFollow

NoFollow is an attribute said to be used by only Google, but Google is the biggest search engine by a wide margin. This attribute is automatically applied by many sites, most blogs, to any backlink which tells Google to disregard this link for rankings purposes. Therefore it is important to build DoFollow backlinks, which are actually just backlinks void of the NoFollow attribute.

Page Relevance

The relevance of the page on which your backlink is placed is also very important. If your site is about cars then having a backlink coming from another page about cars, or about car parts etc., is going to do more for you than having a backlink from a page about Barbie dolls. This is because search engines figure that if related websites are referencing you then you must be a good source of information or an important website in that field/niche.

Diversity

You want your backlinks to appear as natural as possible. In the real world people from many different platforms would link to you in many different ways if you were an authority site that deserves to rank well in search engines. Because of this you should get backlinks from as many places and platforms as possible. Build backlinks from blogs, from forums, exchange or request backlinks from other websites. Write articles with your links in them, submit your website to social networking and social bookmarking sites. Acquire backlinks from not only.COM domains but also.ORG,.GOV and.EDU domains. Simply try to be as diverse as possible in your link building efforts.

Hopefully you can use these factors in determining the strength of a backlink to focus your efforts in the right places and build powerful backlinks to realize the best possible position in search engine rankings.

Freelance Digital Marketing Strategy Consultant with a focus on Seo. I love writing tech related stuff while I drink my first coffee at 5 am. I also have 2 dogs that make my life complete.