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 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?

So we have proven that search engines put a lot of weight behind keywords, but the quality of the backlinks are also checked. Backlinks that come from websites that have a high page rank (i.e. Google considers them good websites) are a lot more important than backlinks from pages with low page ranks. A backlink from the BBC website for example is worth a lot more than a backlink from a website that was created yesterday.

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 can you get backlinks?

Backlinks can be generated by writing on forums and putting your website as your signature. Similarly, blogging or writing articles can generate backlinks. There are other services that allow you to buy backlinks or you could ask website owners to link to your website. If you seriously want to get in the top few results of certain keywords though you should not ignore backlinks.

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