A Backlink is a URL Link that is Pointed Towards your Website

What's a backlink? A backlink is a URL link that is pointed towards your website and is very important to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. The backlinks from external sites can link to your home page or may link to internal pages within your website. Linking to internal pages is often referred to as "deep linking" and can help raise the importance of those internal pages in the eyes of the search engines.

The more backlinks you have referring to your website, the more the search engines trust your content. In the original Google algorithm, backlinks were a very important part of the equation used to determine where your site was placed on the search engine result pages (SERP's). In today's world, the algorithm is much more complicated and the value of the backlink has been diminished slightly from the original.

Google uses the backlinks that it finds on the Internet pointing to your site to calculate a value called the PageRank (PR). Every page in your site has a pagerank, even if it is 0. Pagerank is one of the many factors that are used in the Google search algorithm and it's importance has seemed to diminish over the last couple of years. We do know that even if you pagerank has become less important, backlinks themselves are still very important.

You may also hear backlinks referred to as inbound links, inward links, incoming links, or inlinks. All of these terms are synonymous with each other.

Backlinks can be used to find related websites that have linked to you, gauge your website popularity (or someone else's), and view what others may have written about the page being linked. When looking for the quantity of backlinks to your site, Yahoo is much better at reporting the real backlinks.

Google's reasoning for only showing a subset of the backlinks that it knows about for your site is to protect their search algorithm. Also remember that many times, the page that has your backlink will not show it's true PR because the page hasn't been through a Google PageRank update yet.

The long term premise behind using backlinks was that the site pointing to yours is voting for you. At one time that vote had a very significant impact. However, over time, all the search engines are becoming more sophisticated and put less weight on this backlink vote. More recently they are putting significant emphasis on the content and context of the page being linked to and linked from. Pages with little to know relevance to each other end up counting very little.

There are numerous methods for obtaining backlinks to your site. Some of those are:
1. Article distribution with resource boxes
2.. Adding meaning full comments to related forums and blogs
3.. Buying home page or site wide links - not recommended unless it is in context
4.. Link Exchanges where you trade reciprocal links or multi-way links

Hint: You want your backlinking strategy to appear natural to the search engines so you need to make sure that you are acquiring backlinks on more than just high PR web pages. There are significantly more low PR pages on the web then there are high PR pages.
The wanted result of getting all these backlinks to your site is to increase the natural search engine traffic that is directed to your site by being on the first page of the SERP's. But you should also see some traffic that comes to your sites through the backlinks themselves. So, when getting backlinks, you want to keep the reader in mind and try to make it enticing for the reader to click your link because there is something on the other end that they need.

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