If you have researched search engine optimisation the chances are you would have come across the term “backlink”. A backlink is essentially a hyperlink that is found on an external website (external to yours) that points back to your website. These are really important for SEO - search engines put a lot of weight behind them. As example, go into Google and search for the term “click here”. I bet the number one result is Acrobat Reader, right? How can Google put this at number 1??

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?

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.

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.

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.

Getting 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.

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.