This post covers the most important basics you need to know about backlinks. Getting backlinks to your web pages is an essential part of search engine optimization (particularly for Google). Some backlinks will help your site climb in ranking more than others, though. Read on to find out about the three factors that determine how good a backlink is in terms of SEO. These three factors are: Amount, value and anchor text.

Following are descriptions of each of the three factors:

Number of Backlinks

This first factor is the simplest. More backlinks means higher rankings. As a rule of thumb, at least.

The reason for this is that whenever someone links to a site, that represents a “vote” for that site. Someone linking to your site is basically saying: “Check this out, there’s something worth seeing there.”
And the more people are saying that there’s something worth seeing on your site, the better your site must be.

This could be all it takes to rank websites fairly, but for one little factor: Money. There’s a lot of money to be made from high search engine positions for lucrative keywords, and therefore there are many people trying to game the system and get their sites to the top. It’s very easy to build backlinks for yourself, so just going by the number of backlinks would favour those sites that have very effective link-spamming mechanisms in place and that would not be ideal.

That’s why two more (main) factors come into play:

Link-Value

This is the most debated and most elusive factor determining website ranks. The simple truth is that no one, save for a few Google employees, knows exactly how backlink-value is determined.

Here are a few things we can safely assume, however:

Page Rank
 A link coming from a high authority website is more valuable than one coming from a low authority website. However, exactly how the authority of a website is determined would warrant an article (or even a book) of it’s own. You can assume that the more traffic a website is getting, the more people are participating on that website and the higher the Google PR of that website is, the more valuable a link from it will be.

Obviously, a link coming from the front page of a huge news-site with millions of visitors is going to mean more in terms of SEO than a link coming from your cousin’s blog, which gets two views a week.

Link Position
Another important factor is where on the page the link is located. For example, if a link is placed in the sidebar of a blog, it is slightly less valuable than if it’s placed inside the body content of the same blog. The same thing goes for links placed in comments. The context, and number of other links on the same page also play a part. For example, if your link is just one among hundreds a page consisting mainly of links, then it’s not very valuable.

Link Distribution
It also matters where your links are coming from in a greater context. Hundreds of backlinks, all coming from the same domain are probably less valuable than just a handful of backlinks coming from many different sites.

Link Anchor Text

Last but not least, the anchor text of links pointing to your site has a great influence in which keywords the site will rank for. As a side note: The anchor text is the (usually blue and underlined) text that takes you to a website when you click it.

The anchor text of your backlinks help the search engine spiders decide which keywords to rank your page for. Ideally, you want to get many backlinks that have your targeted keyword as their anchor text. However, you should avoid getting many backlinks that all have the identical anchor text, because this looks unnatural.

My personal recommendation is to use your targeted keyword as the anchor text in about 70% of the links you build, closely related terms in about 20% of the links and unrelated/general terms (like “click here”) in about 10% of the links.

Rule of thumb

The rule of thumb for good backlink building is this: the more natural your backlink-profile looks, the better.

Diversity is key, in this regard. You can’t go wrong with links from different sites, using variations of anchor text and placed in different contexts on the sites.
Also, don’t shy away from getting links from low-authority sites. Just make sure you don’t spend too much time pursuing lower-value links.

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