True SEO Means Getting Strategic Backlinks

One of the very best ways to improve your website's search engine rankings is by obtaining strategic backlinks. You get a backlink when a website other than your own links to yours.



To explain why these are so important, and so helpful to your search engine rankings, it might be helpful to understand how Google and the other search engines decide where to rank your page. The key to understanding this is in understanding what it is that Google is trying to provide. When someone types a word or phrase into the Google search bar, they are looking for something, and Google wants to provide them with exactly what they are looking for in as few clicks as possible.



Being good at providing relevant results is what has made Google the world's top-rated search engine. It stands to reason that Google will rank your site higher if you provide content relevant to the phrase being searched for, but how does Google know what your site is about? Two ways, really, one of which is the content on your page, but that's not what we're talking about here.



The second way is through backlinks. Each time some other site links to yours, it's like a vote telling google and the other search engines what your site is about. Google reads the anchor text in the link, which is the blue text you actually click on in the link, and that tells them what they might expect to find on your page. The more backlinks pointing to your site, and saying the same thing about it in the anchor text, the more relevant google believes your page to be, and the higher they will rank you.



To give you a brief and ver simplified example, suppose you have a site about dog grooming classes. The more sites you can get to link to yours using the phrase "dog grooming classes" as the anchor text of the link, the more Google will believe that's what your site is really about, and the more confident they will be recommending your site to searchers looking for dog grooming classes. Again, this is overly simplified, but that's basically what makes backlinks so powerful.



There are other factors, like how popular and relevant are the sites the backlinks are coming from? But knowing just what's talked about above puts you ahead of 90% of website owners out there. Next article, we'll talk about specifically how to get more of the right kind of backlinks.