Where Should Backlinks Point?

All the guides a gurus agree that backlinks to your main site are important for ranking well in the search engines. But the term "your main site" is not really clear is it? You have your home page at www.yoursite.com, but then you have any number of landing pages, posts, and other urls at www.yoursite.com/xxx.

Is there any prevailing wisdom on which pages on a site should be receiving these backlinks?

Here is where I get confused. If I obtain zillions of backlinks to my main site url, that probably won't help me rank on a specific keyword if that word doesn't happen to be on the front page. If I want to push a certain post optimized for a certain keyword phrase, it would seem that I should get as many good backlinks to that post's url as I can. But those links would then not go to the front page, and I don't know if that's a bad thing or not.

Did that make any sense?

Thanks.

Ken

Ken

You are right.

You need links to your subpages, with anchor text that corresponds to the topic of each page.

Getting links to your home page is of course good, because that is often the easiest to do, and if you have a keyword rich domain name then the home page can be easier to optomise for, but don't ignore the subpages.

Ken,
The answer is variety! You should be getting links out there back to each separate page/blog post, category, main page, etc. And when linking back, if possible you want to use anchor text that is your keyword phrase(s) for that specific page.

Here are two great blog posts by Lynn that might help further.

Effective Link Building

Getting High Quality Inbound Links

You've said your self, but always remember to get backlinks from sites related to your industry

Thanks! Great articles too.

Ken

Each page on my site has some specific keywords and if I do seo for this page, I use these keywords and this page is the landing one. Having backlinks only to the main page is not a good idea.

Michael Campbell built this excellent free site about linking. It's informative and it works -- http://www.jigglingtheweb.com/

Great question, Ken. You need inbound links to EVERY page on your site that you want to rank well for it's keyword phrase. Each page should be optimized for it's own keyword phrase, relevant to the content on that page, and then rank well for that keyword phrase - which requires inbound links.

In addition to the 2 articles above (thank you Angie!), also see:

Stop Linking To Your Home Page!

:)

Not all backlinks are equal...so to pay attention to this detail can make a difference in ranking over time..;)


# from a range of IP addresses ( especially if hosting multiple sites from one company must get sites on different ip addresses )
# containing your choice of, and a variety of, anchor text
# perhaps created slowly
# from .edu and .gov sites on occasion if you can
# from mixed PR, high PR if you can
# to different pages of your site, not just the homepage
# within a paragraph of related content (contextual, rather than clustered)
# dofollow if possible, controversial

lexus...

You are right ... google is king for relevance and this is why they are the best at what they do in delivering search engine results for what you are looking for and will reward you for doing so, and if you know what to do when you get those backlinks u will get rewarded even more.