After researching search engine optimisation you will more than likely have come across the term “backlink”. Backlinks are basically hyperlinks that link to your website from another. Search engines put use these backlinks to find out how relevant your web page is for a particular search term. For example, type the keyword term “click here” into Google. I bet the number one result is Adobe Reader, right? How can this be the case?

Look on the website and youll see that the term click here doesnt appear once on the website. Well, the reason is because tens of millions of websites have a link to the Adobe Acrobat Reader website with the anchor text click here (the anchor text is the writing you see on the screen with the hyperlink underneath). Google therefore thinks that this website MUST be the most relevant page on the internet for the search term click here.

What’s 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 number of backlinks is probably also considered, although this is not proven - the truth is nobody really knows how the Google algorithm works when it ranks it’s pages.

In addition to quality and quantity of backlinks, the website that a backlink comes from should be relevant to the website its pointing at. For example, if someone puts a backlink on a car auction website that points to a travel company, the two websites are not relevant to each other so Google will put less weight behind the link.

How can you get backlinks?

Writing on forums with your backlinks in your signature is one method of generating backlinks. Another is to write blogs or articles. You must not ignore backlinks though if you are serious about getting on the front page of Google for your keyword term.

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’s a good quality 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.

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.

In addition to quality and quantity of backlinks, the website that a backlink comes from should be relevant to the website its pointing at. For example, if someone puts a backlink on a car auction website that points to a travel company, the two websites are not relevant to each other so Google will put less weight behind the link.

How do I 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.

In this article, you’ll learn a simple strategy for that could generate hundreds or even thousands of highly targeted website visitors, and all you need to do is make one small change. It’s quick and simple to do and it can have an incredible effect on your website traffic and earnings. Most website owners never benefit from this strategy because they either don’t understand it’s importance, or they do it incorrectly.

What am I talking about?

On every website you own, you need be sure you’ve correctly optimized your images for Image Search. If you take a few minutes with each page and optimize every graphic correctly, you’ll quickly start to get found by people searching through the Google and Yahoo image directories. Here are the 3 steps you need to take to get maximum benefit from every image on your website.

Step 1 - Whenever you name images for your website or blog, make sure you use a keyword that closely relates to what the image is actually about. Then always add a keyword-rich Alt tag to each graphic to double it’s chances of getting found. Then whenever possible, add as many keyword optimized Graphics to your site’s pages as you can to bring in organic search traffic from Google and Yahoo Images.

For example, an image of a sandy Beach in Puerto Rico might be called puerto-rico-beach.jpg, and your Alt tag might say Puerto Rico Beach. Make sure you don’t try to fool the Search Engines by calling an image something that it’s not; you might be penalized for it.

Step 2 - Ensure the pages containing your Images are optimized correctly for identical or very similar keywords. This will help to keep your site congruent in the eyes of Google and Yahoo, and will increase your search rankings. For example, the file name you use for a page containing an image you’ve called Puerto Rico Beach would be called puerto-rico-beach.html or something close to that. It should at least have Puerto Rico in the file name, the Title Tag and Description if possible.

Once you have started optimizing your images correctly, keep adding more content and optimized Graphics to your website, and your organic search engine traffic will continue to grow. This technique is so effective because most people don’t understand it’s importance, or don’t know exactly what to do. if you optimize your images, you will have a clear advantage over other websites in your market, and your traffic should receive a significant boost.

Step 3 - This is something that’s really important. NEVER name images of Guarantees, Order Buttons or other non-critical Graphics by what they are. Instead, use numbers for these unimportant (in an SEO context) pictures. For page optimization purposes, Google will look at the total number of images on your page and decide how relevant each image is to the other content on that page. Let’s say you have 4 images on a page. If 2 of them related to a beach in Puerto Rico, and 2 that are called order.jpg and guarantee.jpg, your page’s images will only be 50% relevant to the rest of the content. That’s bad…

If your Order and Guarantee images are called numbers such as 0098.jpg and 0099.jpg, Google will disregard them, and your page images will be seen as 100% relevant, giving you additional Kudos from the Search Engines, and potentially increasing your rankings, traffic and profits.

Rocky Tapscott is a Site Build It expert and mentor who works with small and medium sized business owners to boost their sales and profits. He has developed a Free 27 page Report which shows you how to create multiple income streams using a simple but incredibly effective email marketing and follow up system - Grab your Free Report now.

As an Internet marketer it is important for you to keep up with new developments in Search Engine Optimization strategies to keep your websites fresh and viable in the competitive world of Internet marketing. Good search engine optimization will improve your traffic.

Some things never change. But Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does change periodically. You need to make your sites appeal to search engines with on-page optimization to help them rank well despite the newest changes in SEO.

Search engines provide valuable services for Internet users and they are for-profit businesses. So when webmasters tried to fool the search engined with inappropriate tags or keywords or with overloading their sites with keywords -”stuffing”, that was considered to be black-hat (bad guy) techniques. Search engines did not stay “fooled” for long because that would diminish the value of their services.

When the meta-tag stuffers got banned or sand-boxed, new SEO rules came along. Part of the new rankings methodology involved giving value to the kind of “votes” sites were getting. Backlinks became more of an effective way for the search engines to assess what sites were really about content-wise. So the next thing the search engines did was to give higher rankings based on the number and quality of backlinks each site had.

Then came social bookmarking, and it became very easy to get thousands of backlinks a day from this new social marketing phenomenon. However, social bookmarking links, since they’re so easy to get became devalued and most social bookmarking sites have all rolled over to no-follow as their default link attributes.

Here is what happened. The search engines decreased the value of metatags and social bookmarking links. Then they increased the value of on-page optimization factors. For instance, you saw over the past several years a rise in the importance of LSI and LSA on your site. That means LSI, or latent semantic indexing and LSA, latent semantic analysis are more highly valued for search engine optimization.

LSI and LSA are becoming widely known terms now because there is a certain way to build websites just the way the search engines want them to be built. If you write and publish content using some or all of the main keywords, sub-keywords and somewhat-related keywords, then your sites have a far better chance of ranking well with less backlinks than webmasters who build sites without knowing how to do proper-on-page optimization.

Pay attention to how you optimize your site for search engines so you can benefit from the traffic they generate. Once you learn how to improve your SEO you are beginning to get serious about the value of your site’s content. Then you will start to see improvements in the activity at your site. Learn what on-page optimization your site needs to pay close attention to in order to rank well with less effort.

Daniel McGonagle gets high rankings with all of his websites. His free newsletter shows you how to increase website traffic and get your sites ranked highly with the best traffic generation methods possible.