What is a backlink?

What is a backlink and why is it so important to how you promote your business online ?

A backlink is a link to any of your web pages from another website.

In general, the more backlinks you have to a page on your website, the higher it is rated by Google and the better chance that page has of gaining a higher place in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages).

In practice though it doesn’t quite work that way any longer.

Why Do Search Engines Place Importance on Backlinks to Your Website ?

As Google has over 60% of the search market we will use them as the example to make the explanation simpler.

Google is a business (a very big and profitable business) that is focused on serving it’s customers – that is, you i.e. the people who use Google to search the Internet !

Google wants to keep and improve its market share so it wants to provide you, the Google customer, with the best results for a search that you make using the Google search engine.

Backlinks are conections to your website from other websites

So Google has a method of ranking each webpage on the Internet for the keyword (see our article on keywords for an explanation of what they are) you are searching for. This patented methodology takes into account the age of the website, its relevance to the keyword you are searching and the number and quality (also known as authority) of backlinks to the webpage.

In short, Google ranks web pages based on the relevance of the content on the page, the quality of that content, the age of the website and the number and authority of the backlinks to that particular page.

A backlink is like a ‘vote’ for your website or, more accurately, a page on your website from another website. In theory the more votes you get the better.

All votes are not created equal however. Google recognises some websites as authority sites and therefore places a greater weight on their vote. Authority backlinks include those from government websites, education websites, popular highly regarded websites such as online emagazine sites and others.

A listing in DMOZ (The Open Directory Project is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors – source Wikipedia) is also helpful to your site’s ranking.

Also a paid listing in Yahoo’s directory (about US$300 per annum) will gain you ‘points’ towards a higher ranking for your website.

How Do I Go About Getting Backlinks for My Website ?

A few years ago it used to be a simple process of getting as many backlinks as you could by whatever methodology was available.

Profitable businesses existed just to get backlinks for others. Backlink farms would help websites with no relevance to each other to link to each other to get new backlinks.

So Google worked out methodologies to find out whether the backlinks to a website were from other sites that had any relevance to the website. If not, they no longer have any value.

Based upon Google’s continued improvement in battling those that manipulate search to promote their own websites and those of their clients no matter what the level of relevance to a search (commonly those that employ what are known in the industry as black hat tactics) it is best at present to use white hat tactics to build backlinks.

Writing articles about your industry or your product or service and posting them on online magazine websites such as ezine articles will help.

Obviously getting your website listed by DMOZ and paying for an annual listing in the Yahoo directory will also help.

Try asking other businesses in your industry or industry associations to link to you and you might link to them reciprocally.

If the content on your website is of a high quality you will find that you will generate links as other websites link to your website as an authority in your industry.

Upload videos to Youtube (and / or its competitors) and link back from Youtube to your website.

Just drop us a line explaining your situation, your website address and what you are trying to achieve via your website.

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