Backlink, backlink, backlink ~ you hear it all the time. To get good search engine position you need lots of backlinks to your site. That’s all fine and good, but here’s the problem ~

What the heck is a backlink???

A backlink, in very simple terms is a link from one site pointing back at yours. That’s it, just a link that point to your site.

Now it starts to get a little more complicated when we start putting more “vocabulary” in there. anchor text, keywords and all that good stuff, but remember, it’s just a link pointing to your site.

So let’s talk about anchor text for a minute.

Anchor text is the words you actually click on in a link to go where the link points to. This is the ANCHOR TEXT of my link. You see, those words are the actually text of the link, if you click those words, you will go somewhere (right back to this blog, but you can point your link anywhere)

Now when we say “keyword anchor text” that simply means you want to use the keywords you are targeting for that page or lens or hub as the anchor text. So for this post I’m talking about backlinks ~ that’s the keyword. So a keyword anchor text link for this article about backlinks would like just like that. (you see how backlinks is underlined and now links to the homepage of this site?) That’s what a keyword anchor text backlink is.

Now there is a difference between a keyword anchor text backlink and just a backlink ~ here’s a fine example where I’ve used both in a resource box for an article at Ezinearticles.com:

You can see “free basic internet marketing tutorials” is the keyword anchor text backlink in this resource box ~ and learnitstepbystep.com/bog is another backlink ~ but it is NOT a keyword anchor text backlink. Most people will not go to Google and search for learnitstepbystep.com/blog in reference to the topic this article was about.

Why use keyword anchor text backlinks?

When google is deciding on which sites to put on the first page of the search engine results page (the page that shows up when you go to google and look for something) it looks at how many backlinks all the sites have. Each link counts as a “vote” for that site. Let’s say a url link (like the second one in the example above) counts for 1 vote ~ because it IS a link back to the site. Let’s say the keyword anchor text link counts as 5 votes because that tells Google exactly what the page I’m sending you to is going to be about ~ and that’s what their searcher is looking for.

The more keyword anchor text links you have pointing at your site the more “votes” you get. The more “votes” you get the higher your site will come up on the search engine results page.

The higher you are on the results page the more traffic you will get from Google.

The more traffic you get from Google the more click throughs you are likely to get.

The more clickthroughs you get, the more sales you make.

So . . .

The number of keyword anchor text links you create back to your site directly affects the number of sales you make.  If you have the ability to create the text to your links make sure you use your keywords.  There are of course some places that don’t let you create the text for your lens, and that is fine, but if and when you have the ability to choose, ALWAYS choose your keywords as the words people will click on.

How do I know if I have any Backlinks??

It’s pretty hard to tell from Google how many backlinks a site has because they will not tell you exactly how many backlinks a site has. They will give you an “estimate” ~ which is generally a pretty small number.

Yahoo however, will give you a little bit better idea. You can go to Yahoo.com and enter links:your-url.com and it will give you a list of all the places that have linked back to your site.  Here’s an example from this site.  ~

You can see that at this time this blog currently has 268 sites  linking back to it.  Now how much is enough will totally depend on what you are targeting, and that’s a much more advanced lesson ~ but this will let you see if your links are showing up for your site.

So where do you create backlinks?

The places are endless and that’s a whole other post ~ but think about anywhere you have the ability to put a link ~ profile pages (even google profiles let you put anchor text keyword links on them ~ if you can link from Google itself ! BINGO), free platforms, blogs, social networking communities.  Here’s a lens I created all about getting backlinks. (ya see that keyword anchor text backlink there??)

So hopefully things are a little clearer about what a backlink is, how you know if you have them, and where to get them if you don’t. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments area below.

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