All About Backlinks

You will have come across the term "backlink" in your research by now. A backlink is an inbound link to your website, article or other content from another website. 

For example, let's say Bill Frug has written an article about computer sound card hardware on his blog Twist And Frug. Another site that deals with computer hardware called Tech Up may produce an article about sound cards that links to Bill's article with the blurb "If you want to find out more about the Colobus Sound Chunder XVII, here's a great article from Twist And Frug."

The link from Tech Up is Bill's backlink. 

Why Backlinks are Important

Backlinks are important for several reasons. Firstly, when you link to other sites from your content, it gives visitors to your site a way to discover more information in an easy and direct fashion and improves their overall experience. Relevant links to other articles are therefore very worthwhile.

Another factor is that some search engines including Google will give your site more credit if it has a decent number of quality backlinks leading to and from it. Your site will gain more relevancy compared to others in a search enquiry. Backlinks are therefore very powerful indicators of your site's quality.

The importance of quality here cannot be stressed enough. The search engines will scan the site doing the linking to determine the quality. If the content of the linking site is relevant to that of your article or site, then that will be considered a higher quality link, and your content will gain higher search relevancy.

The more backlinks you have, the better, for obvious reasons. You want to attract traffic to your site by whatever means possible. Backlinks are hugely valuable for this reason, particularly when they are on popular, high-traffic sites.

Manipulating links or trying to game the system will not help your cause, though. Search engines will look for organic, natural link patterns that grow over time, and massive link spam farms will be ignored, or worse, may damage your search engine score. You should also be careful about what sites you link to, as some may have a bad reputation which will bring down your own quality score. 

Creating high quality backlinks is therefore crucial to Search Engine Optimisation, and should be high priority in your SEO strategy. 

Later we'll examine how to go about getting backlinks from other sites in detail, but for now focus on the importance of high quality content that others will want to link to.