Increase Your Page Rank with Brilliant Back Links

Back links are other sites that link back to our content. They’re very important for how well a site ranks in the search results. Google looks at back links as one of its measures to assess how important a site is.

To explain the logic, imagine you have two pages with very similar content, both very well optimised and both from sites that are evenly matched in size. In isolation it’s now quite a task to work out which should rank higher in the results. Let’s say Page A was written by a leading expert in the field whereas Page B was written by a blogger who’d read about the subject from the expert and decided to write a similar piece on it themselves.

This is where the back links come into effect. Assuming that the leading expert is well known in their field, you’d imagine that many colleagues, industry sources, news sites, might link to his content as a matter of course. This would provide him with a range of related back links to his page where the blogger couldn’t realistically expect to pick up any without working for them.

So if Page A has 10 back links, of which 7 are from directly related sites then it can be logically considered more important than Page B which was a couple of links from other unrelated blogging sites. This very simple example shows you the general principle of back links and why they’re important to your content.

What Makes a Brilliant Back Link?

When we’re looking at back links to content, it’s not just a numbers game. Volume of links to a page does have an effect but there are lots of other considerations about relevance and relative strength that outweigh sheer volume. Here are some important considerations when researching potential back links:

1. The PR of the sending site. The more important the sending site, the more value is added to its links. A link from a PR7 site is much better than a PR2 site.

2. The relevance of the sending site to the content. If you’re selling widgets, a back link from a widget related site is much better than an ice-cream site.

3. How many other external links the sending site has. If you’re one of a hundred links on the sending page, you’re much less special than if you were one of ten.

4. Where your back link is provided on the sending site. Prominent within the content is much better than sitting at the bottom of the page in small print.

5. The anchor text of the back link. This is the wording used and a description using your keywords is much better than just your URL, or worse still, “click here”.

You should consider all these factors when looking for sites that you would like to get back links from. It’s much better to send individually tailored requests to a handpicked selection of highly relevant sites than carpet bomb a general area. Of course this involves a lot more effort than just going for numbers, so naturally far fewer people do it, and the results will be much greater.

Back link Strategies and Research

OK, so you’ve decided to make the effort and target some sites for back links that are relevant to your content. What you need now is an attack plan of how to go about creating your shortlist, contacting them and hopefully getting the all important links you want.

A good place to start will be to search for your keyword. Let’s continue the widgets example and assume that you’ve got a page optimised for the term, “Blue Twirling Widgets”. If you now do a search for “Blue Twirling Widgets” every site that appears above yours in the search results is a possible target and needs adding to your long list.

Assuming you know your market, you’ll know many Widget related sites, industry bodies, widget directories, news sources, and widget bloggers. All these need adding to the long list too. Once that’s done you can start to look at some more general directories and wider industry type sites that might still have relevant areas of content from which you could get a listing.

Once you’ve got your long list of potential sources you need to go through it, checking the sites against the criteria given above to find which ones are the golden nuggets, and removing any that look like they’re low value for this exercise. You should now come to your shortlist.

You should contact these sites individually and on a personal level, explaining what you’d like and why it would be a benefit to them to link to your content. Tell them exactly where you the link should go to offer their visitors this extra information. If appropriate link back to them first, before you contact them and explain how their reciprocation would better serve your mutual interests.

As you’ll know if you run your own site, site owners receive innumerable requests for back links, almost exclusively in some form of generic e-mail, asking for links to irrelevant content for no real benefit. These requests are more often than not systematically deleted. Amongst this rising tide of ill conceived rubbish a well laid out request with a personal touch always catches the eye.