Kerrie Sheehan’s Blog

Having one way links, or backlinks, leading to your website is critical to your search engine placement and traffic generation. The more inbound links you have, the higher up the search engines you will go and the more opportunities you will have to grab traffic from other websites.

There are so many reasons why it is important to build backlinks.

1. Search engine link popularity. All search engines have some form of ranking system. This is how they determine where to place your website within their search results. Link popularity is a major factor. Their reasoning being that if other sites like your website content enough to provide a link on their site, then it must be good quality content. Therefore, the more backlinks you can get, the more value the search engines will give to your site and the higher they will place you in the search results.

2. Traffic generation. When visitors surf the web and they land on a site of interest, they will navigate through the site to find the information they are looking for. If they come across a link to your website, it is a natural progression for them to click on the link and go to your website to gather more information on the topic of interest. This is a way for you to grab traffic from other websites. Therefore, it is very beneficial for you to try to get your links onto sites that have a good trust value to the search engines and high traffic.

3. Keyword ranking. Whenever possible, you should use your keywords as anchor text in your backlinks. Using the keywords as anchor text defines the content of your website to the search engines. By repeatedly using the same keywords as anchor text, you are giving the search engines directions and establishing your site as an authority on the subject. You can witness the effectiveness of this strategy by doing a search for the keyword phrase “Click Here”. You will see that Adobe Reader will come up in the top position. This is because of the number of times the anchor text appears with the URL to the download Adobe Reader linked to it.

These are just a few ways that backlinking can benefit your website and why it is so very important for you to develop an off page SEO plan.