The Click Depot Blog

First of all, what are backlinks? Backlinks are simply links pointing to a page. So why are they not called just links? Well, you could call them that, but looking at it from your site’s perspective, you have links on your page, for instance, this link to the best raleigh internet marketing company (ok, i had to insert some propaganda, afterall, i want to make money too is an outbound link whereas any links pointing to this page (like the one you should add on your blog is a backlink.

Backlinks are also called inlinks (by Yahoo), inbound links (by Google) and so on.

So why are they so important? Read this post about search engine ranking factors and you’ll see that we said quality backlinks are the #1 factor in ranking pages higher on organic search results. Quality backlinks can skyrocket your website’s popularity and help your drive tremendous amounts of web traffic to your site. If you are serious about your business, whether is is online of offline, you need to know how to generate quality backlinks for your site. For that you first need to know what quality backlinks are.

Here you go, the seven qualities of a quality backlink:

1. Popularity: The page where the link is situated should be popular. In other words, that page should in turn have a lot of quality backlinks itself. It is emperically proven that SE’s look at at least 2 degrees of link popularity to determine rankings. Google page rank is a good measurement of the popularity of a page even though these days its accuracy is being questioned. So, if this is all too confusing for you then just know that you should get at least a few links from pages that have a google page rank that is higher than your page.

2. Outbound links: The page that you are getting backlinks from should not have too many outbound links on it. The recemmended number is 25 of less, in general. This is what makes the links from directories relatively less useful since directories typically have several dozen links on one page.

3. Age: The older the link that is pointing to your page, the better. This way search engines know that you are not buying links temporarily form a website to drive your link popularity.

4. Do Follow: Some websites mark some of their links as NO FOLLOW within their HTML coding or using other SEO techniques. They usually do this to avoid spam. No follow links are basically avoided by search engines when they determine rankings for a certain page.

5. Relevance: The link should be on a domain that is relevant to yours. It is increasingly becoming apparent that search engines understand link neighborhoods. In other words, if you are florist website and get a link from a website that talks about flowers, the link has more weightage than a link from a car mechanic shop. Now, your car mechanic might genuinely love the flowers he buys from you, but say sorry to him, search engines don’t really like his link all that much.

6. Location: Links that are mingled inside content (also called content links) are better than links that are on the footer or the header of sites or on a popup window for instance.

7. One way: Now this should actually rank pretty high up in this list but it’s down here because it is sort of obvious these days. Reciprocal links are less useful towards the link popularity of your website than one way links.

Now that you know what quality backlinks are, your next goal should be to find out how to get them. There are a lot of resources on the web that talk about this, but I’ll give you my 2 cents in a future post..

I knew you’d ask. I knew it. The million dollar question, it is. I wish I could tell you I know exactly Search engines (SE) look for when they rank pages for specific keywords. The truth is noone except the Ph.D’s at Google, Yahoo and MSN headquarters that are paid big bucks to create and maintain this algorithm know this.

I have a friend who worked at Ask.com and now works at Yahoo Search and even he does not know the specifics of the ranking algorithm. Why? Well, if that information were to get leaked out, I really think the Internet will be a crazy place and search engines will not be nearly as effective as they are today. SE results will be a lot less relevant since people with manipulate them with ease instead of letting the SE’s determine true relevance. There is already enough black hat SEO stuff out there without people being sure about how and what exactly SE’s look at.

The other point to remember is the SE algorithms are constantly changing. The algorithms are tweaked to increase the relevance of search results and make search engine marketing more lucrative for pay-per-click customers. They are also tweaked to make it harder for people to manipulate their sites to inappropriately display higher on search results.

That being said, if I don’t know the answer to this question, then what is this whole deal about SEO? Well, based on research, experimentation and emperical testing, it is process to read into the SE algorithm. At least somewhat. And that’s what SEO’s have done over the years.

So. let me give you my version of the truth. The factors are listed in the order of importance according to me.

1. Number of quality backlinks pointing to your page

So what are quality backlinks? I am going to have to write a separate post about that. But in essence, backlinks form high page rank, relevant, aged pages, preferably containing your keyword in their anchor text are quality backlinks. I know that leaves you asking for more evidence and explanation which is why a separate post is in order.

2. Your keyword in your page’s Title tag.

This is more important than most people realize. Your title needs to be carefully crafted to include 2-3 of your keywords but at the same time sound relevant and enticing to your human readers. I spend over 3-4 hours per month figuring out the right Title for my most important pages.

3. Age of your page/domain

Exact extent of this is hard to gauge because the older pages also usually have more “optimization” done on them over time naturally. But it is much easier to rank higher for pages on domains that are old.

4. Your Keywords in your URL

Search engines used to give a lot more importance to this a few years ago than they do now, but this still ranks among the top 10 ranking factors in my list.

5. Age of the backlinks pointing to the page

This is a factor that was almost not important at all 5 years ago but today, is gaining importance steadily as more and more websites buy “Temporary” links. So those temporary links will be rendered ineffective as a result of this rule since SE’s will not consider newly formed links for ranking pages. A generaly rule of thumb is to have links that are over 90 days old but again, that’s not set in stone at all. Just based on experience.

There are several sources for more information on this topic.

1. SEOmoz search engine ranking factors is exhaustive but too general.

2. Here’s a good discussion about the number one ranking factor on Google

Several other sites talk about this. And there’s too much information out there in fact. The crux of SEO, like in life, is FOCUS. Focus on the top 5 factors. Don’t get overwhelmed by the whole thing. Just one SEO technique applied right can sometimes make a HUGE difference. If you have even thought about optimizing your page for search engines, you are ahead of 75% sites out there. If you have spent 5 minutes on it, then you are perhaps ahead of 90% sites.