Just a bit about search engine optimization.

Anyone who has looked into getting their website optimised for search engines will more than likely have come across the term backlink. A backlink is a found on other people’s websites, and are hyperlinks that link back to your website. Search engines look for these backlinks to determine the relevance of a website. The example usually used to highlight the importance of backlinks is the search term “click here”. If you look in google or yahoo for this term you’ll no doubt find Acrobat Reader at No 1. So how can it rank so highly for a keyword term that is of no obviously relevance?

If you click on Adobe Reader’s site and search for the term “click here” I don’t think you’ll find it. The reason search engines think it is the most relevant is because websites all over the planet point a backlink to this website with the anchor text “click here”. The anchor text is the wording that the user sees over a hyperlink. With all these millions of websites pointing to Acrobat Reader for this keyword searches engines rank it incredibly highly for this term.

What Makes a Good Quality Backlink?

So now you have seen that search engines use backlinks, so what makes a good backlink? Well, a backlink from a website that Google trusts is far more important than a backlink from a website that Google doesn’t trust. Therefore, backlinks from websites with a higher page rank are more important. If you can get a backlink from a website like Wikipedia for example, this would be considered a lot better than from a website that Google doesn’t know about.

The number of backlinks is also probably considered, but because no one other than those working at Google know exactly how the ranking system works this cannot be verified.

Another way to improve the backlink is to make sure your backlinks come from pages that are relevant to your own. E.g. if someone owns an estate agent website and points a backlink at a dentist’s website, there is no relevance between the sites so Google will probably not put a lot of weight behind the backlink.

How can you get backlinks?

Backlinks can be created in a number of places online. You could reply to threads on forums, you could write articles or you could write blogs. All these methods allow you to place backlinks in your signature at the end of your post, thus creating backlinks. If you are serious about ranking well in Google and other search engines you must not ignore backlinks!