Now don’t get me wrong here, website optimisation is important, but the fact is that a site needs a number of quality backlinks in order to rank highly. What is that magic number? Well that depends on the strength and number of your competitors as well as the niche.
In an email to a friend this week I used the following example as a demonstration of the power and importance of backlinks.
Try this now: go to Google and type in click here.
The site that comes up as the #1 search result? Get Reader – Adobe.
If you follow the link to that site and see the page – not only will you not see the words “click here” in the title tags, heading 1 or 2 text or alt text or bold or itallics you won’t see it anywhere on the page at all.
Inbound links will override on page optimisation or make up for lack of it, if there are enough of them from quality sites and pages.
Now think about this example…why would Adobe Reader rank for the term click here? How many websites have you visited where a document was viewable only via Adobe Reader and just incase you did not have Adobe Reader the site using it for the document you were trying to view provided a link to the page where you could download it. Guess what the text that contained the link read? Click Here.
When you get lots of (good quality) links to your site and the text that contains the link reads “your keyword” your site will rank in the search engines for “your keyword”.
Now when you do all you can (adding your keyword to the title page, heading 1 and 2 and alt text) to tell search engines your site is about “your keyword” and lots of other sites link to your site with “your keyword” search engines trust that a page is about, what you say it is about, and this will boost the trust in the links to your own pages as well as those from outside pages.
