If youve done any research into search engine optimisation you would have probably stumbled across the term backlink. Backlinks are hyperlinks that point to your website that are found on other peoples sites. Google and other search engines use these links to determine how important your website is. For example, consider the search term click here. On Google, if you perform this search youll find that Adobe Acrobat Readers website is ranked at the number 1 spot. How can this be?

If you click on Adobe Reader’s site and search for the term “click here” I don’t think you’ll find it. The reason search engines think it is the most relevant is because websites all over the planet point a backlink to this website with the anchor text “click here”. The anchor text is the wording that the user sees over a hyperlink. With all these millions of websites pointing to Acrobat Reader for this keyword searches engines rank it incredibly highly for this term.

What makes a good backlink?

So with the click here example you can see that backlinks are very important ” but Google also checks out other factors. The backlinks that come from important sites (those with a great page rank) are considered a lot more important than those that come from sites with no page rank. If you can get a banklink from Wikipedia for example, this would be considered a very good quality backlink and Google will put more weight behind it.

Google also considers the quantity of backlinks, although this may not be as important as quality. The truth is, nobody really knows the Google algorithm.

If a backlink points at a website that is relevant to the site it comes from this makes a better backlink. A dog owners website pointing at a pet website is probably OK, but a building company’s website pointing at a computer manufacturing website is not.

How can you get backlinks?

You can get backlinks via a number of places – posting articles on websites, writing blogs or replying on forums, all these places can allow you to leave a signature, and within this you may be able to create one or two backlinks. If you ignore backlinks you will probably not get a good ranking, and if competing websites get a lot, you’ll be at a disadvantage.

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