How Important Are Backlinks?
If you have researched search engine optimisation the chances are you would have come across the term “backlink”. A backlink is essentially a hyperlink that is found on an external website (external to yours) that points back to your website. These are really important for SEO – search engines put a lot of weight behind them. As example, go into Google and search for the term “click here”. I bet the number one result is Acrobat Reader, right? How can Google put this at number 1??
If you log onto this website you won’t even be able to find the term “click here” on it once. So why does it get such a high result for this term? Well, the reason is simple. It’s because millions of sites all across the internet link back to this website with the anchor text “click here”. The anchor text is the text that appears over the top of the link. Search engines come to the conclusion that because so many other sites are linking to this site with the term “click here” it has to be the most important and relevant page on the net.
What makes a good backlink?
Hopefully you now appreciate that Google and other search engines put a lot of weight on the backlinks to a website, however, the quality of the backlink is also checked. Backlinks from websites that have low page ranking (i.e. Google doesn’t think much of them) will not be as important as a backlink from a webpage with a high page rank. So if you can get a backlink from Wikipedia for example, this is an excellent quality backlink – Google will put a lot of weight behind it!
The quantity of backlinks are also important, although probably not as important as quality. The fact is nobody apart from those working in Google knows how the algorithm works.
Another thing to note is that search engines look at the relevance between websites. If there is a link from a website about SEO and this links to a website about cars, there is little relevance here and Google will probably consider the backlinks low quality.
How do I get backlinks?
Backlinks can be generated by blogging and writing articles where you put in the resource box at the end a couple of backlinks. Additionally you can buy backlinks or ask other website owners to post a couple on their website. By ignoring backlinks you will be at a significant disadvantage and will probably not rank well in Google. But by getting a lot of backlinks you can do very well and even end up on Googles first page of results.










