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 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.
Other terms for backlinks are incoming links, inlinks, inbound links, and inward links.
Backlinks can be used to find related websites that have linked to you, gauge your website popularity (or someone else’s), and view what others may have written about the page being linked. When looking for the quantity of backlinks to your site, Yahoo is much better at reporting the real backlinks.
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.
The long term premise behind using backlinks was that the site pointing to yours is voting for you. At one time that vote had a very significant impact. However, over time, all the search engines are becoming more sophisticated and put less weight on this backlink vote. More recently they are putting significant emphasis on the content and context of the page being linked to and linked from. Pages with little to know relevance to each other end up counting very little.
There are numerous methods for obtaining backlinks to your site. Some of those are:
1. Web Directories
2. Website Link Directories (some are paid and many are free)
3. Adding your comments into blog posts and forum discussions
4. Purchased links via link brokers (currently frowned on by Google)
5. Link Exchanges (not as effective when they are reciprocal)
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.
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.