The 3 Most Important Factors in Getting Backlinks

Building links to your website has become one of the most important factors in getting a high rank with Google and the other search engines. Back in 2001, a couple of keywords and meta tags was enough to get the search engines crawling all over your site. Today, it's a very different ball game and the SEO world has changes significantly - for the better I believe.

When Google introduced their Page Rank system, they had one thing in mind: Importance. Think about it. Google is in the business of connecting information to search terms. When you do a search you want the most relevant, the most informative and the most important results for your search. Simple as that.

To determine which sites are important, Google use back links as a way of checking which sites are the most important. Authority sites get lots of links from other relevant sites because they have valuable information; information that people in that niche or market are looking for.

This is how the whole back link theory was born. Like all things in the world of SEO is became a bit distorted simply because it can be manipulated. Today, waiting for natural backlinks is just not the way to play the game. To be competitive you have to actively build links - especially in niche markets. It's okay if you are Apple.com because millions of sites will link to you anyway, but if you are losebellyfatfast.com then you probably won't get millions of incoming links.

Page one rankings in either Google or Yahoo can mean a lot of traffic to your site. Not only is this free traffic, but it's targeted and will give you much higher conversions that run of the mill advertising campaigns where you have to pay for your traffic.

So what are the most important factors in building links? There are 3 main factors in building links that you have to live by. Do this and you will get great ranks and lots of Google love. Ignore it and your site will be doomed to a dull live on page 107 where no one ever sees you.

1. Page Rank
Getting links from sites with a high Google Page Rank is the most important factor. The logic is that if an important site thinks that you are important enough to link to, then you must be important (yes it's a twisted logic, but that's Google for you).

2. Relevance
Getting random links from random websites is fast becoming worthless. Google's algorithm is getting smarter and one thing that it's getting smarter at is sniffing out relevance. Getting links from other authority sites in your market, niche or category is wort infinitely more than random links from generic websites.

3. Anchor Text
The common example of how important anchor text is, is with the search term "click here" which has Adobe Acrobat as number 1 in Google. Why is this? The words "click here" does not even appear on that page? Well, it's simply because millions of sites use the anchor text "click here" to link to the download page of Adobe Acrobat. So, when you are building links it's important to use your keywords and keyword phrases in the anchor text.

There's a lot of debate about how quality and quantity of links match up in the Google ranking wars. For the most part the evidence is that quality of links will always outweigh quantity. A good strategy for link building is to focus 60% of your time on quality and 40% on quantity. The important thing is to get links though cause in the end it's the only thing that will get you ranked and make you money.