1. Backlinks
by: Kevin Barnes - Traffic Geyser
2009

2. What you will learn
What are backlinks?
The Importance of backlinks
Backlink structure
Common problems with building backlinks

3. What are backlinks?
Backlinks are inbound links that are directed
towards your website or other online
properties.
link
Web Page
Web Page
Web Page 1
Web Page 1 2
2

4. The importance of
backlinks
Backlinks are important and are a major
building block to SEO because some search
engines, especially Google, will give more
credit to websites that have a good number
of quality backlinks, and consider those
websites more relevant than others in their
SERP’s for a search query.
The number of backlinks is an indication on
the popularity or importance of that website.

5. The importance of
backlinks
Search engines calculate the relevance of a
website based on keywords.
If there are no inbound links going to a site,
the search engines will do their best to
decide and rank the site for a keyword they
deem relevant.

6. The importance of
backlinks
Let’s look at an example:
Dog
Dog Click
Click
Care
Care Here
Here
Dog
Dog
Training
Training
Dog
Dog Dog
Dog
Care
Care Care
Care

7. The importance of
backlinks
Think of each one way inbound link as a vote.
Every time you get a relevant one way link
your site your sites authority increases.
It’s harder to influence the search engine
with external backlinks from other websites.

8. The importance of
backlinks
Focus on getting QUALITY inbound links.
Just getting inbound link is not good
enough. It’s the quality of the inbound link
that matters...

9. Backlink Structure
What makes a quality link?
• Search Engines consider the content of
the sites to determine to quality of the link.
When inbound links coming from other
sites have content related to your site, those
links are considered more relevant to your
site.
• The higher the relevance of the inbound
links, the greater the quality.

10. Backlink Structure
Example of what you don’t want...
Poor quality link
Your Site
Your Site Off Site
Off Site
Dog Training
Dog Training Car Racing
Car Racing

11. Backlink Structure
Example of what you do want...
Good quality link
Your Site
Your Site Off Site
Off Site
Dog Training
Dog Training Pet Training
Pet Training

12. Backlink Structure
Anchor Text: The contextual content that is
hyper linked on a webpage.

13. Backlink Structure
How to make the anchor text using HTML
<a href="http://Domain.com">Wikipedia</a>

14. <a href=”get.adobe.com/reader/">Click Here</a>

15. Backlink Structure
You want backlinks pointing to your
websites that are using the keywords that
you are wanting to rank in the SERP’s for.
Having your Keywords in your Domain URL
can be very helpful, but its not the end of the
world.
http://www.Keyword.com/

16. Common Problems with building
backlinks
Nofollow links
Building links too fast
Link Exchanges
To many forum links
Low PageRank links

17. Common Problems with building
backlinks
Nofollow links
Nofollow links are links that have the
rel=”nofollow” tag within the url code.
example:
<a rel=”nofollow”
href=”http://www.URL.com/”>Keyword</a>

18. Common Problems with building
backlinks
Nofollow links
Make sure that the links your getting are not
all nofollow links. This will make ranking
website for your keywords harder.
You want to focus on getting dofollow links.
These are links that do not have the nofollow
tag.

19. Common Problems with building
backlinks
Building backlinks too fast
This may flag the search engines that your
(spamming) and your site can get slapped in
the rankings.
You site can get black listed...

20. Common Problems with building
backlinks
Link Exchanges
Are sites that link to you if you place a link
back to there site. ...may be easy to get but
they will cost you.
This was popular in the 90’s and can be
considered spam today.

21. Common Problems with building
backlinks
Too many forum links
Having links in your forum signature can look
like spam.
Don’t put a lot of links in your forum
signature. Try to stick to having just one.

22. Common Problems with building
backlinks
Low PageRank Links
PageRank was developed by Google and is
on a scale from 0 -10. Ten being the highest
quality score.
Focus on getting links that have high PR.
These links have more authority and get
indexed by the search engines more often.