Backlinks Are The Key To Your Websites SEO Future

by Anthony Stai

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.

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.

Additional terms for describing backlinks are: inlinks, inbound links, inward links, and incoming links. These terms are all used interchangeably.

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.

Google’s reasoning for only showing a subset of the backlinks that it knows about for your site is to protect their search algorithm. Also remember that many times, the page that has your backlink will not show it’s true PR because the page hasn’t been through a Google PageRank update yet.

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.

When you are trying to get more backlinks to your site, there are a number of different methods to gain those links. Some of the more effective ones are :

1. Web Link Directories

2. Articles Distribution

3. Comments in forums and blogs

4. Purchased links (currently frowned upon by Google)

5. Link Exchanges (not as effective when they are reciprocal)

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.

So what can you expect after getting all these backlinks to your site? You should see a climb in your search engine rankings for the keywords that are targeted by your backlinks as well as a general increase for your other terms. You should see your own sites PageRank increase over time (next couple of updates). And best of all, you should see an increase in traffic to your site that is coming from both the search engines and the additional backlinks to your website.

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