What is a Backlink? How does it work? Where to get Backlink?

What is a Backlink is a vital site listed on Google, that adequately tells the overall importance of backlinks in regards to websites and search engine optimization, and also tells the story of the most powerful way to create backlinks for websites. There is much controversy and myth concerning backlinks; therefore, Butch Hamilton attempts to take the mystery and confusion out of the process for those finding and absorbing the information found on this intriguing site. To learn what a backlink is, we must first define it for more important insights into the process.

Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.

Inbound links were originally important as a primary means of web navigation; today, their significance lies in search engine optimization, or commonly called SEO. The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a webpage). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page. SEO is the art and science of obtaining top positions on Google for sires, and is certainly included in the discussion concerning producing relevant backlinks that push the site higher in the searches.

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking, popularity and importance. Google’s description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. The key to the whole process is to create relevant backlinks. Too often people will attempt to spam their way to success with a site. This is totally an unneeded, and unwanted process. People should be keenly aware that overdoing on the search engines is one of the chief causes for no success on those searches. Knowledge of this form of search engine rankings has fueled a portion of the SEO industry commonly termed link spam, where a company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to their site regardless of the context of the originating site.

Websites often employ various search engine optimization techniques to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website. Some methods are free for use by everyone whereas some methods like link baiting requires quite a bit of planning and marketing to work. Some websites stumble upon “link baiting” naturally; the sites that are the first with a tidbit of ‘breaking news’ about a celebrity are good examples of that. When “link bait” happens, many websites will link to the ‘baiting’ website because there is information there that is of extreme interest to a large number of people. Gaining good solid traffic and readers to websites is key. Creating professional, yet easy to read sites is a process that most people will simply not spend their time working on. They had much rather take the pushbutton approach to marketing, and from personal experience, most times this will lead to dismal failure in promoting businesses.

There are several factors that determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage granted the backlink. A backlink represents a favorable editorial vote for the receiving webpage from another granting webpage. Another important factor is the anchor text of the backlink. Anchor text is the descriptive labeling of the hyperlink as it appears on a webpage. Search engine bots (i.e., spiders, crawlers, etc.) examine the anchor text to evaluate how relevant it is to the content on a webpage. Anchor text and webpage content congruency are highly weighted in search engine results page (SERP) rankings of a webpage with respect to any given keyword query by a search engine user.

Increasingly, inbound links are being weighed against link popularity and originating context. This transition is reducing the notion of one link, one vote in SEO, a trend proponents[who?] hope will help curb link spam as a whole. Once again, writing keyword specific content with the express intent and purpose of gaining readers should be the goal of any good SEO link building system. It does not matter what type of system one chooses, the content placed within the system will govern whether a backlink will be produced or not.

In the next article concerning what is a backlink, we will discover some real time results achieved in a relatively short amount of time when implementing a proven backlink building system.