Backlinks is a term that you see over and over in Internet Marketing circles. Everyone says you need lots of backlinks from high page rank sites – what does this mean? Why do you need any backlinks at all?
First, let’s agree on exactly what the term means. A “backlink” is actually a clickable link (a hyperlink) on website “A” that when clicked leads to website “B.” Very simple. Since a backlink is also a link, you will often see the terms used to describe the same thing. Now why would you care if other people linked to your site?
The biggest reason by far is Google. Each of the three major search engines (Bing, Google and Yahoo!) have proprietary algorithms that are used to rank websites. Bing and Yahoo! do use the number of backlinks going to a site in their calculations, but Google, the largest search engine, puts a huge amount of emphasis on the number and quality of backlinks when ranking sites.
So if you want to rank on the first page of Google for your keywords, you had better have a lot of high quality links going to your site. And since Google still carries at least 75% of today’s search traffic, it actually is very important for your site to rank well in the results from a Google search.
Of course backlinks are not the only factor that determines a site’s rank, the quality and amount of original content is important, and so is the on-page SEO that is done to the site. But, the fact is, the number and quality of your backlinks will pretty much determine where you rank on Google. And if one site is as good as another regarding content and on-page SEO, then the site with the most high-quality backlinks will win the ranking war.
What determines if a link is high quality? Web sites are given a “page rank” rating by Google based on several factors, including the age of the site, the amount of high quality information on the site, the authority of the site, and others. A link from a high page rank site is given more weight than a link from a site with low or no page rank. There are also certain types of sites (sites that end in .edu and .gov are the best known) whose links are automatically very highly ranked by Google. Generally speaking, it is more difficult to get backlinks from .edu and .gov sites, and these links are very desirable.
How is the best way to get backlinks? There are a lot of different methods that will work. You can buy backlinks for a monthly or yearly fee, but as you can imagine, this can backfire if Google decides to crack down on sites that sell links. You can subscribe to services that give you a list of sites to go to monthly to make your own links. There are also people who will create links for you for a monthly or per link fee. And you can subscribe to forums and blogs in your niche and join in and make comments and posts and create your own backlinks.
A lot of people find backlink creation to be a very tedious and time-consuming job, which is why there are services to help with this task. Other people enjoy spending time socializing on forums and blogs. The main thing to remember is, it is very important to continuously work on building backlinks to your site. How you decide to build the links is up to you.