Backlinks what are they and what they can do for your website?
Backlinks are simply links from other websites back to yours, or another site, they are also known as Inbound Links (IBLs). These links are basically the placing of your web address on another’s page, linking to your site and allowing others to easily click and get to your website.
Backlinks have been a fundamental part of the Internet since the beginning. Before search engines, people moved between sites in either of two ways – by entering a URL, or using links from one page to another.
When SEO first became prominent Google and other search engines gave huge weight onto this form of linking, as it was one of the most important things in determining a page. Googlepage rank still gives this backlinking a place as a determining factor in the importance of a page and Google’s PageRank system notes ‘“Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B”.
Though, not just as important as they were originally, IBLs are still one of the tools used to determine the importance of a site. Inbound links from trusted, quality sites are a significant indication of quality and popularity and Google pays a lot of heed to them. Quality not Quantity Inbound Links are not merely important as regards quantity and Google bases SEO for these on quality. Sites with relevance to the content of your site are seen as of better quality than non-relevant sites. This is to prevent people loading sites with irrelevant backlinks to improve SEO and also to cut out the idea of buying backlinks from other sites.
Google also will look at sites and the speed of the building of backlinks. Building a large number of backlinks over a short period arouses suspicion. Natural links built over long periods are rewarded by search engines. This is there to prevent webmasters using certain programmes to build links, insert hidden links and be generally deceptive as regards links. Pages with these large numbers of links are known as link farms and disregarded by search engines. This is where the onus on quality, natural links comes into play. Linking to a link farm can have significant negative consequences for your sites SEO.
Good backlinks are important as they get your name out there and make your site visible to the world and potential suitors for your service. Reciprocal linking is often central to this procedure, though this is a grey area and there are numerous issues over this practice with changes regularly occurring in this area.
Understanding the anchor word with which you are linked back to from other sites is also important as it dictates the relevance of certain words to your site. Anchor texts are the words used to link back to your site. So, instead of having a click here, you have a link under a relevant word highlighted for backlinking. These all help with linking back to your site and are just some of the many ways in which backlinking helps your site.
