When building and optimising a website, you need to consider which websites link to your site; these links are called backlinks. They are extremely useful for helping your website rank higher, but it’s important to make sure the links that are coming through to your website are from relevant and reputable sources.

Search engines consider these factors:

Source
If the link is from a site that has high traffic, is relevant to the keyword people are using to search for your website and is seen as being a trustworthy website with a good reputation, then the search engine will assess these links positively and will effectively improve your rankings. If you’re linked from a website that is seen by a search engine as disreputable and irrelevant then it could lead to your website being penalised.

Information
A lot of people try to get away with putting a backlink on every source possible, this is called ‘Black Hat SEO’. They do this to try and cheat the system in the hope of having the edge over people trying to rank for similar keywords. Search engines frown upon this and will penalise your site if they find out you have done this.

The most effective way to rank your website positively is by using backlinks from relevant sources. For example if you are a wholesale trade supplier, a good backlink would be from a customer who sells your product. If it was to come from a personal blog about horses it will not be effective and will be ranked poorly by a search engine.

Keywords
The anchor text or ‘link text’ is the visible link on the website. This text should contain a strong keyword relevant to your site, as this shows people visiting and search engines what the link is about and its relevance.

For example, if you were to have a link leading to Root Fifty Two, you could just use www.rootfiftytwo.co.uk, but this would be ineffective as it doesn’t give any indication of where it would be linking to, but if you were to link Web Design Burnley, it would be a lot more effective, and search engines will rank it positively.