Backlinks Are The Key To Your Websites SEO Future
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 greater the number of backlinks pointing to your website, the more the search engines will appreciate and trust the content on your site. The original Google algorithm placed a very high importance on backlinks when calculating where to place your site in the search engine result pages (SERP’s). In today’s algorithm, the calculation used for backlinks is much more complicated and does not carry the same weight that it did then.
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 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.
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.
Here are some various methods for generating backlinks to your site:
1. Web Link Directories
2. Articles Distribution
3. Comments in forums and blogs
4. Purchased links (currently frowned upon by Google)
5. 1 way or reciprocal link exchanges – 1 way links are much more desirable
Hint: You want your backlinking strategy to appear natural to the search engines so you need to make sure that you are acquiring backlinks on more than just high PR web pages. There are significantly more low PR pages on the web then there are high PR pages.
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.
Filed under: SEO