Good, Better and Best Backlinks for SEO

Better To Have Than Not

Backlinks are like lifelines for your website. They bring help in the form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by aligning your site with other high traffic sites. Backlinks are basically an endorsement of your website by the referring website. While certain types of backlinks are clearly better than others, as the title suggests, it’s better to have any type of backlinks than none at all.

These Are Good

When you’re starting out, we would encourage you to take any and all backlinks provided they aren’t spam or something else unsavory. The more backlinks you get, the better search engines like Google or Yahoo like you. For this reason, you should take even the less valuable backlinks. We’ll just call these Good because, remember, they’re all good.

For SEO, we would define a good backlink as one found in a sidebar or footer of pretty much any website regardless of the relevance or traffic of the website. This backlink isn’t in a prime area, doesn’t have relevant surrounding content and isn’t on a high Page Rank (PR) site. It’s a backlink, though, and it will leave its trail throughout the search engine analytics jungle.

These Are Better

Moving up a notch, we would classify a Better backlink as one found in an article or blog post or embedded in a good page of content that is relevant to what you do. This is a better link because it is more likely to be clicked through back to your site by someone who is looking for you or someone like you. The relevance and context of your link to the page can also make search engines happier.

Backlinks like these would be better. What would help even further is if there is some good anchor text that fits the context of both the page where you have a backlink and the product or service you provide through your website. The anchor text should actually be kind of a lead in that prepares anyone about to click your link by telling them where it will take them. The crawlers at Google are starting to drool a little on this one.

Backlink Nirvana

Since I want to stop typing before you get tired of reading, let’s skip a couple intermediate steps here and go straight to the Promised Land. In the best of all worlds, what type of backlinks do you covet over all others? We’re talking about the Holy Grail of backlinks. It would look something like this.

You get yourself a backlink on a super high powered, high traffic website. It’s on their highest PR page (PR 10, baby!). It’s included in the content of a relevant informational article or blog. It has glowing and relevant anchor text, and…wait for it: it’s an authority website in your field. You have now achieved the state of Nirvana and can lie back and reap the rewards of your genius. Or you can go get a few more and maybe grow your business. Your call