The best backlinks are hyperlinked to search terms that are important to the destination site and which search engines match to actual searches made online. Keywords linked this way are commonly referred to as ‘anchor text’. For obvious reasons, the destination site owner is best placed to identify words and phrases most likely to affect his search engine positioning than leaving reciprocal link partners to determine suitable wording – another good reason for favouring one way over two way linking.
So imagine your website is about growing tomatoes, ‘growing tomatoes’ is part of the domain name, and the site has twenty pages with content based around ‘growing tomatoes’. This is classed as internally ‘search engine optimising’ a website and it means when someone keys ‘growing tomatoes’ into a search engine your site has a good chance of ranking well in the returns.
External optimisation operates outside the relevant site, such as by creating keyword rich backlinks from other people’s sites.
For our current example external optimisation might involve writing articles and blog posts featuring ‘growing tomatoes’ in their titles and body copy and as the hyperlinked link leading back to the destination site.
MAIN BENEFITS OF BACKLINKING
Backlinks do more than merely grow a site’s reputation with search engines. For example:
* Backlinks add value to a website and grow its resale value as well as inflating advertising revenues. So you can generally expect a higher resale price for a website with backlinks than a similar site without incoming links. Also, if you take paid for promotions at your site, your advertising revenue should grow exponentially with incoming links.
* Plentiful backlinks from respected websites establishes you as an expert in your chosen field, especially where you offer advice and quality content across a wide range of online platforms. You do this by offering free advice in forums, for example, or answering questions online, or writing articles for online directories or blogs, where each new source of quality incoming links impacts favourably on search engine rankings.
* Once website visitors recognise your name and trust your advice, they’ll begin talking about you and recommending your site to fellow web users, and so creating backlinks for you. Quite apart from search engine ranking, every reference to your website URL has potential to drive traffic to your site, regardless of actual quality of backlinks. That’s because every visitor counts, and the more traffic arriving at your site, regardless of source, the higher it can climb in search engine returns.