It is an incoming link to a website or blog. Let me explain with an example, because that definition is about as clear as mud! Let’s say you have a blog, and you have a myspace page. You want your myspace friends to know about your blog, so you put a link to your blog on your myspace page. That is a backlink to your blog. It works the same if you point people to your myspace page from your blog as well. The concept really is easy. It gets a little more complicated when you start talking about why they are important because then you need to know a couple other technical terms such as search engine optimization and page rank.
Backlinks are one of the most important aspects you need to consider when you’re trying to build a higher ranking in the search engines. The search engines can perhaps find and index your site without backlinks, but without backing backlinks the search engines will never suggest your site to any of their visitors. Backlinks are essential for SearchEngine Optimization(SEO) because they help to judge the popularity and importance of the website based on their backlinks to other sites. Search engines use a number of standard criteria to rate sites on the web and backlinking is high on the list. And Search engines can recognize quality link when they see one. Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. In other words, taking action to get your website to come up at the top of the list of returned websites when someone searches Google for your keyword. This is also known as the search engine results page or SERP. It is a combination of SEO and backlinks that will increase your page rank. What’s a page rank you ask?
Page Rank is simply a number Google gives your page based on how important it feels your page is. Google decides this number based on several factors including, you guessed it, backlinks.
Why should you care about page rank?
Page rank is a crucial part of the equation when it comes to deciding how high you rank on the search engine results page. A site with a higher page rank is going to come up higher on the list than a site with a lower page rank. We all know how much traffic a site listed on page one of google can get, and although it can be a difficult task to accomplish, however, one easy way you can help your site move up is with backlinks.
Google only updates PR every three months at best and during this time millions of new web pages are born that start off without any PR at all. When assessing your backlinks and you come across a page that appears to have a PR0 that has linked to you remember to check the PR of the home page because the subpage may have been created after the last Page Rank update and consequently won’t show any numbers on the green PR bar. Google also gives new websites a waiting period of three to four months before giving it any kind of Page Rank. This is referred to as the “sandbox effect”. Google search engine gives a lot of weight to backlinks that your site receives and the keywords that are used as anchor text in that link. Thats why Google’s Page Rank exists, to collect the votes (links) for your site and give a score (the Page Rank score).
Links from other sites would need to be something that is relevant to you site. The absolute best type of links are backlinks or one way links to your website. Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. Link building (otherwise known as backlinks) are critical to driving guaranteed website traffic to you. Suddenly, you can get great surges in traffic and hopefully in revenue, if you have monetised your site.
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[...] in the Internet business, especially those in SEO, are very familiar with backlinks. One particular reason why backlinks are important is the way they are used by search engines. [...]