Obtaining external links to your site (commonly known as ‘backlinks’), is perhaps the most important way of ranking your site within Google, or just about any search engine for that matter. Obtaining backlinks is referred to as an off-page optimization factor, and is what determines your sites relevancy.
Since everyone knows what a hyperlink is (a link that points from one site to another), we won’t get into Web 101 basics, as that isn’t what this tutorial was designed to address. Instead we will look at how backlinks can directly help to rank your site within the search engines.
What determines a sites relevancy is what’s known as the ‘anchor text’ within the link pointing to your site. For example, if a hyperlink from one site directing to another site had the words ‘buy oranges’, then the site that the hyperlink was directing to would gain a little authority under the keyword for ‘buy oranges’. The amount of authority the site would gain would depend greatly upon whether or not the site giving out the link had any authority under those terms. A site that was all about lemons would have little authority under the keyword for ‘oranges’, and thus a site that was all about oranges would be a better site to receive a link from.
Another thing that helps to determine the value of an external link is the Page Rank of the linking site. Page Rank was once upon a time a great way to determine a sites authority within Google’s eyes, however experienced internet marketers now know that Keyword Authority and Page Rank are two different thins. Whilst Page Rank may go towards giving a site more trust and quicker indexing, it won’t necessarily cause the site to rank any higher than another site that had the same level of Keyword Authority.
The more quality, keyword authoritative and relevant backlinks you’re able to produce, the greater your chances usually are of ranking for a certain keyword term. This isn’t to say however that quantity is by any means more important than quality (which it once was), as the reverse is now true. You could have several thousand links pointing to your site from unrelated websites and only a single Page Rank 7 link from an on-topic site with relevant anchor text, and yet you may gain keyword authority from the single PR7 link.
The thing to remember with your link building is to focus on obtaining quality, one way links if possible. Reciprocal links don’t hold as much weight today for SEO purposes as they used to.