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?

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.

What Makes a Good Quality Backlink?

With the previous example you’ll hopefully see that backlinks are very important. Howwever, you can get different qualities of backlinks… Backlinks that come from pages that Google considers important (those with a high pagerank) are more important than those that Google doesn’t consider important. If you could get a backlink from the BBC website or Wiki this would be a great quality backlink.

The number of backlinks is also probably considered, but because no one other than those working at Google know exactly how the ranking system works this cannot be verified.

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 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!