It is true that web site backlinks play an important role in getting more traffic to a website and help in pushing it up a search engine’s rankings. It is also true that more the backlinks a website has, the more popular is it regarded as.
Both the above statements are true, and yet they can be false too if the backlinks are not of high quality or are irrelevant backlinks.
Analyzing Backlink Quality
Let us assume there’s an e-commerce website that sells rare Himalayan herbs. Further assume that there are something like 300 sites that link to it, out of which 200 are useless, no-content websites, 75 are good-content entertainment websites, and the balance 25 are a mixture of quality e-commerce nutrient and general wellness sites.
Here is how the backlink quality of the Himalayan Herbs website will be measured:
When the keyword/s “herbs” or “Himalayan” are searched for, singly or jointly, the search engine will spider the Himalayan herbs website and figure out many factors that make the site relevant to the search. One such factor will be the link popularity.
First: The search engine will figure out that 200 links to the Himalayan Herbs site are from useless Internet pages. These useless links will not be counted while computing the search engine ranking.
Second: The search engine will figure out that though 75 good-content websites are linking to the Himalayan herbs site, such links are not very relevant from the viewpoint of the visitors to these 75 entertainment sites. Nevertheless, since the links are coming from good-content sites, the search engine’s software will consider these as good “votes” and factor these backlinks while computing the search engine ranking.
Third: The last 25 backlinks will be counted as genuine quality backlinks because these links are received from websites that are not only high-quality but also relevant to the Himalayan Herbs website. These are the types of backlinks that are reckoned by search engines as ones taking your website up on popularity scale.
Getting Quality Backlinks
There is no magic bullet formula for getting quality and relevant backlinks. To begin with, your website must have strong content and a decent enough design, because if you don’t have strong content and are not presentable, no website would like to tie up with you. But quality content is the real king because even if you have the most beautiful-looking website, if it is not backed by quality content then it is of no use.
Next, you have to locate quality websites that have content relevant to your website. Once you locate such a website, you have to write a professional letter to that website’s webmaster explaining him the benefits of linking with your website. If you do not have the time, then you can assign he job to link-building professionals, who can do the job for you for a small fee.
Once your links are plastered on many websites, you must track the number of visitors you are getting from such websites. Backlink-monitoring will help you figure out where your audience is coming from and what markets you must target.
To sum up, if you have strong content and a presentable design, getting good-quality relevant links will not be much of an issue.
