Anyone who has looked into getting their website optimised for search engines will more than likely have come across the term backlink. A backlink is a found on other people’s websites, and are hyperlinks that link back to your website. Search engines look for these backlinks to determine the relevance of a website. The example usually used to highlight the importance of backlinks is the search term “click here”. If you look in google or yahoo for this term you’ll no doubt find Acrobat Reader at No 1. So how can it rank so highly for a keyword term that is of no obviously relevance?

Take a look on the Acrobat Reader site… Serch for the term click here. I don’t think it even appears once on their site, but the reason Google thinks this is the most relevant page for that keyword is because millions of websites all over the world have a backlink to this site with the anchor text of “click here”. Search engines therefore deduce that Acrobat Reader’s site has to be the most relevant for this search term.

Good Quality Backlinks

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.

Getting a lot of backlinks is probably also a good idea, but the general concensus is that a combination of high quality and high quantity works best.

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 do you get backlinks?

Backlinks can be created in a number of places online. You could reply to threads on forums, you could write articles or you could write blogs. All these methods allow you to place backlinks in your signature at the end of your post, thus creating backlinks. If you are serious about ranking well in Google and other search engines you must not ignore backlinks!

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