The relationship between back links and your search engine rankings

Posted on August 15th, 2009

Before creating a web site you should have decided how you intend to get visitors or ‘traffic’ to your web pages. Whether your website is commercial or not then sooner or later you are going to want to attract visitors. You should devote your energies to getting the search engines to direct as many visitors as possible to your web pages. The most economical and focused traffic is delivered by the search engines.

Search engines make money through presenting searchers with answers they are looking for. Searchers will return over and over again to a search engine that delivers the most relevant results. The more frequently users return to the search engine the more opportunity and income the search engines create. The challenges are the exactly the same for you and your website.Acquire users and keep them coming back.

So how do you do this?. You have two choices but there is nothing to stop you doing both if you have money and time. You can pay for advertising, commonly known as Pay per Click or you can create great content and get people to link to it.

Search engines see nothing but keywords or key phrases everything else on the Internet is invisible. Search engines perform searches based upon the keyword or key phrase entered by the user. The keyword entered by the user causes the search engine to search its indexes for the most accurate and relevant web pages. The two factors that decide what results a search engine returns are authority and relevancy.

Relevance means the page contains the keywords and authority means the page has back links to it from other web pages. Search engines calculate the position of a web page in a returned list of results by measuring the authority and number of backlinks to each page.

Back links are the number one priority you should focus on in web page optimisation.

Back links have two key uses – influencing the search engines ranking decisions and directing traffic to your web site from other internet properties. Users will follow links they find in content if the back link is labelled with relevant text. ‘Anchor text’ is the name given to the text label on a back link and is used by the search engines in assessing the value of a back link. Some back links have more value than others.

The search engines give authority to web pages which can be passed on to your web pages through the back links.Significantly authoritative web pages can pass some of their authority through the back links to your page.