Getting The Maximum SEO Benefit From Your Backlinks

As you probably already know, off-page SEO techniques are extremely important to ensure that a website ranks highly in the major search engines, particularly for a competitive keyword or keyphrase.

One of the main goals of off-page SEO is to generate high-quality one-way links to your site (backlinks) from relevant websites and ideally sites that have a high PageRank (PR). Before you invest hours in creating backlinks to your sites consider the following points to really ensure that you get the maximum benefit from your backlinks:

1) Relevance - it is very important that you try to spend your time creating backlinks from relevant sites. This basically means that if your site sells computers for example then you would benefit immensely from links pointing to your site from other computer-related sites (e.g. hardware, software or PC review sites etc).

2) PageRank - One link from a site with a high PR is much more beneficial than numerous links from PR0 & PR1 sites. It is usually more difficult to obtain links from high-PR sites however you will find that the extra effort you may need to invest will result in significant SEO benefits to your site.

3) Anchor Text - The anchor text of the backlinks is the key to ensuring that you gain maximum SEO benefit from that link. Ideally each individual page on your site should already be optimised for a specific keyword and any backlink pointing to that particular page should contain this exact keyword as the anchor text. The anchor text is paramount because it tells the search engine what your page is about (i.e. your keyword) and this will improve your search engine position for that keyword.

4) Deep Linking - Deep linking refers to links that point to pages of your website other than the homepage. It is very common that people concentrate all of their efforts on creating links to their main page and neglect to deep-link to other pages on the site. It is strongly advisable to invest some of your time deep-linking because this effectively tells the search engines that you have a high-quality site with a number of relevant pages.

You will also benefit from increasing the PageRank of your internal pages which in turn will also strengthen the ranking of your homepage.

5) Create Links Naturally - Create links on a regular basis rather than in intensive batches and remember to never buy links from any source (this will result in sever penalties from most of the major search engines).

Whilst creating quality backlinks is not always an easy process for everyone, by keeping the above points in mind you will give yourself the best chance to gain maximum SEO benefits and hopefully see an increase in your site's search engine ranking.

David Hughes works as an SEO consultant for Website Design Watford and specialises in Search Engine Optimisation for small businesses.