What is a backlink and why do I need it for my site?
I was recently working with a client and had given them an analysis of their website. As I was explaining to them what all the information meant my client suddenly said "What the hell is a backlink?" I had always assumed that everyone knew what a backlink was, I mean the concept seemed simple enough to me how could people not know what they are. Immediately I went about defining what a backlink was. At the end of our conversation my client felt far more informed but what troubled me was since I had never given this question much thought my explanation to my client was rather rudimentary. Backlinks are not a complicated matter but they should mean a little more than simply a link to your site. The purpose of this article is to explain what a backlink is, why it is important in terms of your sites search engine ranking, and how you can gain backlinks without stepping on the toes of Search Engines in the process.
First and foremost, what are backlinks?
Backlinks are simply links to your website from other sources. They are also known as inbound links in some circles. They can be in the form of a listing directory i.e. Yahoo Directory or Dex, a blog post or part of a signature when posting on a forum, or they can also be a direct link from one of your affiliates. What I am trying to get across is that backlinks come in many different forms. Backlinks are one of the most important facets of SEO since most search engines will give more credit or authority to sites that have a high number of quality backlinks. This in turns means that websites with more backlinks are often considered more relevant than others on a results page for a specific query. While they are nearly always helpful to your website and its search engine presence some backlinks are far more valuable than others.
When search engines go about calculating a sites ranking for a specific keyword they consider, among other things, the number of quality backlinks (or inbound links of you prefer) to that site. We should not obsess about having as many backlinks as possible rather we should focus our attention on generating quality inbound links to our sites, as it is the quality of the link that matters and not so much the quantity though quantity can help.
Search engines consider the content of the site to determine the quality of the link. They are looking for inbound links that come from sites with similar content. What that means is if your site sells pet supplies, a link from a pharmacy in Canada is not the type of backlink you want. You should focus on sites that are in a similar niche as you. I tell my clients that I focus on companies that are closely similar but not directly competitive either due to the products/services offered, geographic location, cost, etc. While it may seem difficult at first to find sites that are in a similar bracket but not directly competitive it is well worth the effort. Focus on finding quality sites that you want to link to or have link to you and offer them some incentive for creating this partnership. I am not suggesting a link exchange but there are other methods that will cause other sites to link to you, you simply need to find out what those are.
One important issue to note is that Search Engines have become very particular as of late to the types of inbound links web sites have. Years past it used to be that if you wanted to rank number one for a keyword you found a site that simply was a page full of links, known as a link farm, paid them to place a couple thousand links for you and within a short time you were ranking very well for that specific key word. However, times have changed. Search engines want all websites to play fairly, so to speak, and have therefore implemented rigorous standards when it comes to websites, backlinks and SEO techniques. It has become very difficult to influence search engines with external back links from other websites. The reason for this is that a search engine's criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher. Things such as time the website has been online, to the rate at which your site is generating backlinks i.e. did you have 2 yesterday and 1000 today, etc. all factor in. This stringent criteria, while certainly a nuisance for us, is also one of the reasons that backlinks factor so highly in a search engines algorithm.
Another reason for wanting quality backlinks is to entice visitors. Again using my example of a pet supply company having a link on a website that caters to selling prescriptions from Canada will not generate that site much traffic. It may be noticed by a search engine but again won't be that helpful. The idea behind Search Engine Optimization is partly to optimize your website for search engines but also make it more visible to the end user. So technically you could 10,000+ backlinks from low quality sources but you would rank poorly. What would be a far better idea would be to have 50 quality links from sources that are directly related to your websites purpose will make a far bigger impact than scenario I described prior.
This leads me onto somewhat of a tangent, that is the subject of reciprocal linking. I touched on it for a second earlier in the article but feel that I need to extrapolate on it more. Reciprocal linking seems to be advertised everywhere and while it is an okay technique for getting your website crawled, it is not at all helpful when it comes to SEO work. Google has added reciprocal links to its search engines filter. Many webmasters had setup link exchanges in the past to boost their sites rankings due to having a very high number of inbound links. A link exchange is where one websites links to another on the condition that that website will link back to them. Many of the links that Google filtered were irrelevant; however the outbound links were still counted, therefore reducing the relevancy score of many websites. This in turn caused many websites to be nearly impossible to find on Google.
Be careful with reciprocal links. Since many of them are created by websites that offer a link exchange service one needs to be very careful, and preferably not use such services, when doing this kind of link exchange. Google is currently working a system that will determine not only the popularity of a site but how trustworthy a site is that your site is linking to. What that means is that if you happen to link to site that uses nefarious means to improve its search engine ranking you will be guilty by association and penalized by Google. This could result in being taken off of Google for a period of time.
Another technique to be on the lookout for is known as a "link-wheel". Sometimes a webmaster will have multiple websites. These can also sometimes be on the same web server and thus have the same IP. A common trick, and an attempt to fool search engines into thinking this is not reciprocal linking, is to have each site link to the other in a circular pattern. For example if there are four websites Website A, B, C, and D the link wheel would look like this. Site A would link to B, B would link to C, C would link to D, and D would link to A. Thus creating a circular linking system and generating one link for each website. However this technique can often fail if some or all of the websites are on the same or in a similar IP range. Search Engines have become smarter at noticing these techniques. The best advice I can give you with backlinks is to generate them through having quality content and with sites that have a similar mission or purpose as your own.
Now that I have gone over all the ways you should not build backlinks, and what you need to do to annoy search engines and get penalized, now it is time to give you the inside scoop on how to generate quality backlinks. Content. If you website has quality content on a regular basis people will want to link to you. You can help yourself out in the mean while by submitting your site to places like digg, del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites. However the idea is to eventually generate a big enough following that you will not need to use those methods. Things such as blogging and participating in web forums are very helpful in this regard but that is a topic for another article. For now focus on quality content and the backlinks should come. Use social bookmarking sites to get the word out in the beginning and your links should start generating themselves in no time.
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