trying to understand backlinks....

Hi Zachary,

The key to SEO is relevance. So it's best to use anchor text in your backlinks that are highly relevant (as in exact) to your landing page.

You are spot on about your assumption to link to the most relevant page. It's a good idea to get links to your inner pages (known as deep linking) as well as to your home page.

Backlinks from articles can be very good if the articles are relevant and the anchor text is highly relevant.

Don't worry too much about PR, that a "fools gold" in the SEO business. What gives a backlink it's quality is the amount of targeted traffic it can bring you.

Zach,
Both options work- to a sub page or the home page- But I would do this first:

1. Work out the main topic of your site: eg: muscle building -
2. find the top 3 sites in Google (Have a look for major players amazon, wikipedia etc)
3. Do a back link analysis of them - Know your target first....

(Use this tool: Link Popularity Check - Marketleap Search Engine Marketing Tools)

2. If sub pages come up- also do analysis of the home page (the amount of links int ot the home page- do affect subpages power (ezinearticles.com pages come up a lot without any incoming links)

Article site do have some power- not a lot, I use the main ones (ideamarketers, ezine articles and a few others)

Add them into the mix, and directories too - but look for all different options -really SEO comes down to the work after you know your target!

Link to subpages with the correct longer keywords- it all works if you take the action- lots of it consistent action!

Hope this helps

Hi Zachary - here's my opinion.

You ideally want the keyword "muscle building workouts" to be the anchor text and point to the page specifically talking about "muscle building workouts".

1. You don't want the person clicking on your link to have to work too hard and by pointing to the home page they'd have to seek out where your specific page was that they were looking for in the first place.
2. Your home page is often a "general" page focused on keyword that is more competitive than each additional page within your site. You want any keyword-focused link to specifically link to the page it refers.

I'm not exactly sure I understand your question here but let me try and answer it for you.

What I think you're asking is that because another site has linked to you using the keywords "muscle building workouts" AND that link pointed to your general page and not the specific muscle building workouts page, if the general page would then show up in the listings for that keyword phrase because someone had linked to it.

The answer is possibly. If there's enough sites linking to your home page using that keyword phrase then the search engines will believe your home page to be about that keyword phrase.

However, if you've done all of your on-page SEO correctly, used the keywords in your title tag, in headings, etc., then the page that specifically talks about muscle building workouts would more likely be the page to show up in the search engines.

You are correct.

First, article directories can help you do a couple of things:

1. Get links back to your site (not necessarily high quality links);
2. Get new site's pages indexed.
3. Get links from other sites that use your article (again, not necessarily high quality links).

They don't work well however for ranking purposes of your own site. A good rule of thumb is that the easier a link is to get pointing to your site, the less value it has.

That being said, here's a little tip for you. I have found that Google especially believes the first piece of content it comes across to be the original piece of content. So before you submit your article to article directories, place it on your own site first, get it indexed, and then submit it to the different article directories.

Secondly, the value of a backlink is not solely based on PR. While PR can give you an indication of how the search engines value a web page and shouldn't be completely discounted, simply because a web page has a high PR value does not mean that getting a link from that page will instantly give your site credibility.

The PR that "we" as the general public see is rarely the actual PR that Google has assigned to it.

My suggestion is to find out who is linking to those who are your top competitors and then first attempt to get a link from those same locations, regardless of the PR of the page.