What’s a backlink? A backlink is a URL link that is pointed towards your website and are very important to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. The backlinks from external sites can link to your home page or may link to internal pages within your website. Linking to internal pages is often referred to as “deep linking” and can help raise the importance of those internal pages in the eyes of the search engines.
The more backlinks you have referring to your website, the more the search engines trust your content. In the original Google algorithm, backlinks were a very important part of the equation used to determine where your site was placed on the search engine result pages (SERP’s). In today’s world, the algorithm is much more complicated and the value of the backlink has been diminished slightly from the original.
Google uses the backlinks that it finds on the Internet pointing to your site to calculate a value called the PageRank (PR). Every page in your site has a pagerank, even if it is 0. Pagerank is one of the many factors that are used in the Google search algorithm and it’s importance has seemed to diminish over the last couple of years. We do know that even if you pagerank has become less important, backlinks themselves are still very important.
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 PR calculation and SERP’s. You can find related websites that have linked to you without your knowledge (or permission), gauge your sites popularity compared to another site, and view what others have written about your site/pages. While everyone always talks about getting links for Google SERP’s placement, Yahoo gives a much better actual list of backlinks.
To hide the inner workings of the Google search engine algorithm, Google has refused to show you all of the sites that they know about that link to your site. Google will only show a partial list of those backlinks. Also remember that individual pages that have your backlink on them may not have the current PR calculated and may end up with a much higher PR during the next update.
If my site links to yours then I’m essentially giving you a vote for your site. It used to be (and in some search engines it still is) the only thing that was important to rank high. But, over time, the search engines have been forced to look at other factor due to website spam. The search engines are now looking at the context of the page the link is on and may be looking at the context of the page the link is pointing to. This is called page relevance.
There are numerous methods for obtaining backlinks to your site. Some of those are:
1. Web Link Directories
2. Article Sites like ezinearticles.com
3. Adding your comments into blog posts and forum discussions
4. Purchased links via link brokers (currently frowned on by Google)
5. Link Exchanges where you trade reciprocal links or multi-way links
Tip: Don’t just worry about getting backlinks from high PR sites. A natural pattern of link gathering would be to have more links from lower PR sites because of their sheer quantity when compared to high PR sites.
The wanted result of getting all these backlinks to your site is to increase the natural search engine traffic that is directed to your site by being on the first page of the SERP’s. But you should also see some traffic that comes to your sites through the backlinks themselves. So, when getting backlinks, you want to keep the reader in mind and try to make it enticing for the reader to click your link because there is something on the other end that they need.
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