Backlink Basics < The Organic SEO

Backlink Basics

1 Oct 2007 at 08:00 by Joshua J. Steimle

Incoming links, also call backlinks, inbound links, or “links from other sites”, are one of the primary means by which Google ranks websites. There are four ways in which incoming links can affect your website:

1. First of all, Google assumes the more incoming links a website has, the more important it is and therefore it should get ranked higher.

2. Second, if Google thinks Website A is important and gives it good rankings and Website A links to Website B, then Google also assumes Website B is important.

3. Third, if Website A which has a lot of content about Topic A, and Website A links to Website B, then Google will assume that Website B also has something to do with Topic A.

4. Fourth, the text of the incoming link matters. For example, let's say you own a flower shop call Pink and Purple Pansies that sells flowers online. You should be more focused on improving your rankings for keywords like “flowers” than for “pink and purple pansies” because getting ranked for “pink and purple pansies” is easy, seeing as how that’s probably the text in your URL, nobody else is truly competing for that term, and anybody searching for that term is obviously already looking for you and won't be satisfied until they find you. However, somebody searching for “flowers” is not necessarily searching for you and may not even be aware of you, there is going to be more competition since it’s a more generic term, and you don’t have any inherent advantage when it comes to that term.

That being the case, the more incoming links you can build the text of which reads “flowers” the better, because when Google follows a link from Website A to Website B, it reads the text of the link on Website A and assumes, quite logically, that Website B has something to do with the text contained in the link on Website A, and therefore Website B is going to be ranked higher for a certain keyword if it has lots of incoming links that contain that keyword.

To sum up, the ideal incoming link comes from a high-ranking website related by topic to your website (i.e. the other website already ranks for the keyword(s) you want to rank for), and the text of the link from the other website to yours would contain the keywords you want to rank for.

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