Backlink Building 101: The Basics

Backlink Building 101. Building backlinks is one of the most beneficial but difficult ways of boosting your website among search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. In this short guide I will help you to further understand what backlinking is, how it works and how to think of webpages.

Backlink Building 101: What is a backlink?

A backlink is a simple hyperlink on another website which links back to your website. For example if A was your website and B was another website then B would have a hyperlink on it which links readers to website A.

Backlink Building 101: Why is it important?

Backlinking is important because it is all about reputation and authority online. The greater number of high quality backlinks you have the higher you will rank in search engines results. If you think of links across the internet as a spider’s web, then the more solid links you have the more authority your webpage is seen to have. Continuing the spider web analogy – search engines actually crawl each web page on the internet. This to say that they check every single page which gives their little spider robots access. These robots check for content, structure and more importantly follow each link (about 100 links on average but 300 links per page at most).

Building 101: Links and Web Pages

Websites are a collection of webpages – that is simple. Search Engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, think of webpages as stand alone entities. The reputation of a webpage supersedes the authority of a website (i.e. the combined authority of all the webpages). If you have 10 links from average importance websites linking to page A and 10,000 links from average importance websites linking to page B – you can see that content on page B has more importance to readers online – and so google firstly crawls it more because of the increased number of incoming links plus it also pushed it up rankings because of this authority,

Backlink Building 101: Homepage and Webpages

Most of the time your homepage will have the highest authority rank out of all of you webpages on your website. This is because it is the root domain web page, most people tend to link to the homepage as the basic link to the website they are talking about, and because most people tend to visit the homepage directly after visiting a differently webpage on you website.

Backlink Building 101: Volume or Quality of Backlinks

Always quality over volume. That is easier than said though. Links from organisations like the BBC, a Government website (.gov) or an Educational institution (.edu) are rightly perceived by search engines as authoritative webpages. The quality of the link matters more than having many links from lower quality websites. However, getting links from reputable sources is the first step to link building – whether that is your friends blog, colleagues website or whatever. I would strongly recommend against paying for links and using directory submission websites. You should be aiming for sites which have similar content and in the same industry as you.

I hope Backlink Building 101: The Basics helps you to get a firmer grip on backlinks. Let me know what you think? What advice do you have about link building? Do you agree or disagree with anything I have said? Do you have anything else to add to this? Leave me a reply below.