What is Backlink and why are they important?.

What is Backlink and why are they important?.

Backlinks or Inbound links (IBL's) are the links that are directed towards website and are the building blocks to good Search Engines Optimization. The number of backlinks website has is in a good indicator of its popularity or importance with search engines. Search engines, namely Google, give more credit to website that have a lager number of quality Backlinks and consider those websites more relevant in a search query.

It is not sufficient to just have a high number of inbound links; they need to be quality links. For search engines to determine the quality of inbound links the content of the site is critiqued. The content of the websites you have inbound links with needs to be relevant to the content on your site. The more relevant the inbound links are to your site helps determine the quality of the links. If your site is about breast implants than linking to a site about German Shepherds is not relevant and is therefore not a quality link.

It is easy to get a higher ranking using backlinks than it is to influence search engines with external backlinks from other sites, which is why backlinks matter so much in search engines algorithm. Recently search engines criteria for quality Inbound Backlinks has gotten harder. This is due to people using deceptive tactics.

By having Quality Backlinks you are attracting visitors to your site. You can't just build a website and expect that people are going to find you without being pointed in the right direction. People used Reciprocal Linking to achieve this.

Reciprocal Links were discussed in a recent Google updates as one of the targets for  its latest filters in order to boost website ranking through the number of inbound links, webmasters had agreed upon Reciprocal Link Exchange. This link exchange occurs when one webmaster puts a link on their website to point to another webmaster website. Many of these were not relevant link and were link were still disregarded by search engines. The inbound links were not counted but the outbound links were still counted which lowered the relevancy score of many websites and caused them to drop off the Google map.

Here's short list of things to consider when building backlinks:

• How many backlinks do i have coming to my site? :- This is important. In general, the more backlinks you have to your content, the more popular it is, it's assumed that a greater number of links means that a greater number of people like your stuff.
• Where are my backlinks coming from?:- This is equally important. Google consider backlinks from established and trusted websites as pretty important. it's an indication that your website is important enough to link to from these sites.
• What words are being used to link to your content? :- These links are called "Anchor Text". These types of backlinks actually tell Google what the content is about. Anchor text backlinks are really important if you are trying to get your content to "Rank" for a particular keyword or phrase.
• Do you have any "Spammy" Backlinks? :- Spammy backlinks are links that point to your site. but they look "suspicious". An example might be having 7 Links from the same web page (not domain)   using the same anchor text (i.e. " loose weight") that point to your domain or particular URL.
• Guilt by association :-  if you have backlinks coming form known suspect sites can bring your search engine ranking down too. While one of two links from sites with a questionable reputation may bot do any harm, having a lot of links from them will definitely affect your content's position.
• Do you have social proof?:- Getting backlinks from social networking sites tells Google a lot about whether people like your content or not. Lots of backlinks from Facebook and Twitter gives the impression that your content is extremely popular and therefore very relevant.

Next Chapter : Define Search Engine Optimization