Everybody keeps talking about backlinks. What are they? A backlink is a html link from another site back to your site. They are significant because of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is the practice of making your websites search engine friendly. These incoming links may be pointed to your sites home page or they may be pointed to internal pages (called deep linking) for the purpose of increasing the popularity of a specific section of your website.
In the world of backlinks, quantity is important. However, quality is also important. The more backlinks you have then the more the search engines trust your content. Google’s more recent algorithm updates have included the importance of quality when referring to the page that the link is coming from. It used to be that you could go out and get 1000’s of links and rise to number 1 in the search engine result pages (SERP’s). But, that is no longer the case. Now you need to be more natural with your backlinking strategy.
Google uses the backlinks to calculate a value called PageRank (PR). Many SEO experts feel that the PR value isn’t necessarily the most important factor for ranking high in the SERP’s. There are so many factors that go into the algorithm that it has become very difficult to guess what Google is really looking at. However, we do know that backlinks have remained a constant over the years.
You may also hear backlinks referred to as inbound links, inward links, incoming links, or inlinks. All of these terms are synonymous with each other.
Backlinks can be used for more than just SEO. You can judge your website popularity (or spy on someone else’s), find what others are saying about your website and find all links back to you (not in Google). Yahoo and MSN give you a much better picture of what your backlinks are compared to Google which only gives you a subset.
In an effort to hide the details of their search algorithm, Google will only show a partial list of backlinks. Remember when analyzing your backlinks that some pages may not have the true PageRank displayed because the page was added since the last Google PageRank update.
When another site links to your site, they are basically voting for yours. But that vote is no longer the only thing looked at. The major search engines are also looking at the content and context of the link to determine relevance to your website. If the page containing the backlink has little to no relevance than the link will not be weighted as heavily when the link is counted.
There are numerous methods for obtaining backlinks to your site. Some of those are:
1. Web Link Directories
2. Website Link Directories (some are paid and many are free)
3. Comments in forums and blogs
4. Buying home page or site wide links - not recommended unless it is in context
5. 1 way or reciprocal link exchanges - 1 way links are much more desirable
Also don’t just get backlinks from high PR pages. You want your backlinks to appear natural. So getting backlinks from lower PR pages as well as high PR pages is a more natural pattern.
What’s the final result of your backlink efforts? More visitors to your site and if your site is selling something then hopefully more cash in your pocket. You should expect to get more visitors from the natural search engine results for keywords that you target as well as visitors that follow your backlinks from wherever they occur. Always try to make the backlink context be something that will invite the page visitor to click your backlink and visit your site.
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