I’m sure if you have researched into getting your website optimised for search engines you will have come across the term “backlink”. These are links that are on external websites but point back to your own, and Google, Yahoo and other search engines use these links to determine the importance of a website. As a good working example go into google now and type “click here”. I bet you’ll find Adobe Reader ranked no 1, right? So why is this?

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.

Good Quality Backlinks

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.

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.

Another way to improve the backlink is to make sure your backlinks come from pages that are relevant to your own. E.g. if someone owns an estate agent website and points a backlink at a dentist’s website, there is no relevance between the sites so Google will probably not put a lot of weight behind the backlink.

Creating 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!

No related posts.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.