How Important Are Backlinks

SEO: How Important Are Backlinks?

by Jon Brown

If you have researched search engine optimisation the chances are you would have come across the term "backlink". A backlink is essentially a hyperlink that is found on an external website (external to yours) that points back to your website. These are really important for SEO - search engines put a lot of weight behind them. As example, go into Google and search for the term "click here". I bet the number one result is Acrobat Reader, right? How can Google put this at number 1??
If you log onto this website you won't even be able to find the term "click here" on it once. So why does it get such a high result for this term? Well, the reason is simple. It's because millions of sites all across the internet link back to this website with the anchor text "click here". The anchor text is the text that appears over the top of the link. Search engines come to the conclusion that because so many other sites are linking to this site with the term "click here" it has to be the most important and relevant page on the net.
What's a good backlink?
Hopefully you now appreciate that Google and other search engines put a lot of weight on the backlinks to a website, however, the quality of the backlink is also checked. Backlinks from websites that have low page ranking (i.e. Google doesn't think much of them) will not be as important as a backlink from a webpage with a high page rank. So if you can get a backlink from Wikipedia for example, this is an excellent quality backlink - Google will put a lot of weight behind it!
The number of backlinks is probably also considered, although this is not proven - the truth is nobody really knows how the Google algorithm works when it ranks it's pages.
In addition to quality and quantity of backlinks, the website that a backlink comes from should be relevant to the website its pointing at. For example, if someone puts a backlink on a car auction website that points to a travel company, the two websites are not relevant to each other so Google will put less weight behind the link.
How can you get backlinks?
Writing on forums with your backlinks in your signature is one method of generating backlinks. Another is to write blogs or articles. You must not ignore backlinks though if you are serious about getting on the front page of Google for your keyword term.

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