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?

If you click on Adobe Reader’s site and search for the term “click here” I don’t think you’ll find it. The reason search engines think it is the most relevant is because websites all over the planet point a backlink to this website with the anchor text “click here”. The anchor text is the wording that the user sees over a hyperlink. With all these millions of websites pointing to Acrobat Reader for this keyword searches engines rank it incredibly highly for this term.

Good Quality Backlinks

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.

Getting a lot of backlinks is probably also a good idea, but the general concensus is that a combination of high quality and high quantity works best.

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.

How can 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!

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