The prospect of getting listed on the first page of a Search Engine (or Google – let’s be specific) can seem a daunting task. That’s logical considering how vast an ocean Google really is. But with a bit of smart optimization the task is quite achievable. There are a number of SEO tactics that you can employ to work your site up the Google listings, the most effective among them being getting backlinks to your site.
First let’s quickly examine why sites get to the top of SERPs. The do so mainly due to 2 reasons – their on-site factors and off-site factors. On-site factors mainly involve keyword density – whether relevant keywords are being used in the URL, title, heading, description and content of the site. Even more important are the off-site factors like Page rank, backlinks and directory listing. So the primary reason for those sites having a top search listing is that they have a lot of sites linking back to them and each of those links act as a citation or a vote to the site it is pointing to.
You can check the number of links pointing back to your site by searching for the following phrases:
Google: link: Yoursite URL
Yahoo: linkdomain: Yoursite URL
** Yahoo normally gives a more detailed result on the links. That doesn’t make it better Search Engine than Google though:-)
Now it doesn’t suffice that you have tons of buy backlinks to your site. What also matters is the quality of the sites from where you’re getting the backlinks. It is like saying that the weight of a citation or a vote depends on who is giving it. So a citation from apple.com would mean much more than one from any xyz.com. Straight forward,
right? For that matter, if you happen to get a backlink from apple.com, you’ll be done with your SEO for life. Pretty easy folks!!
OK more seriously, the value of a backlink goes up dramatically when it happens to come from a higher page ranked source. As a matter of fact, getting a backlink from a site ranked 1 place higher than another is equivalent to getting 100 backlinks from the latter. Hence what you need is a combination of quantity and quality of backlinks. A page rank is a measurement to give insight into a site’s global link popularity which goes back to how many sites are linking back to them as well as the importance of those sites. That explains the relationship between a page rank and backlinks.
Along with link popularity, it also important to have link reputation which is to do with anchor text. The anchor text is the word or phrase on which the backlink exists and it should contain the keywords that you’re competing for. Care should also taken that the anchor text is relevant to the content on the site to which the link is pointing to or else you might get penalised sooner or later. And with SEO buy backlinks it always makes sense to look long term as it is built over a period of time.