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What’s a backlink? A backlink is a URL link that is pointed towards your website and are very important to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. The backlinks from external sites can link to your home page or may link to internal pages within your website. Linking to internal pages is often referred to as “deep linking” and can help raise the importance of those internal pages in the eyes of the search engines.

The more backlinks you have referring to your website, the more the search engines trust your content. In the original Google algorithm, backlinks were a very important part of the equation used to determine where your site was placed on the search engine result pages (SERP’s). In today’s world, the algorithm is much more complicated and the value of the backlink has been diminished slightly from the original.

Google uses the backlinks that it finds on the Internet pointing to your site to calculate a value called the PageRank (PR). Every page in your site has a pagerank, even if it is 0. Pagerank is one of the many factors that are used in the Google search algorithm and it’s importance has seemed to diminish over the last couple of years. We do know that even if you pagerank has become less important, backlinks themselves are still very important.

Other terms for backlinks are incoming links, inlinks, inbound links, and inward links.

Backlinks can be used for more than just SEO. You can judge your website popularity (or spy on someone else’s), find what others are saying about your website and find all links back to you (not in Google). Yahoo and MSN give you a much better picture of what your backlinks are compared to Google which only gives you a subset.

Google’s reasoning for only showing a subset of the backlinks that it knows about for your site is to protect their search algorithm. Also remember that many times, the page that has your backlink will not show it’s true PR because the page hasn’t been through a Google PageRank update yet.

When another site links to your site, they are basically voting for yours. But that vote is no longer the only thing looked at. The major search engines are also looking at the content and context of the link to determine relevance to your website. If the page containing the backlink has little to no relevance than the link will not be weighted as heavily when the link is counted.

There are numerous methods for obtaining backlinks to your site. Some of those are:

1. Article distribution with resource boxes

2. Articles Distribution

3. Comments in forums and blogs

4. Buying home page or site wide links - not recommended unless it is in context

5. 1 way or reciprocal link exchanges - 1 way links are much more desirable

Also don’t just get backlinks from high PR pages. You want your backlinks to appear natural. So getting backlinks from lower PR pages as well as high PR pages is a more natural pattern.

So what can you expect after getting all these backlinks to your site? You should see a climb in your search engine rankings for the keywords that are targeted by your backlinks as well as a general increase for your other terms. You should see your own sites PageRank increase over time (next couple of updates). And best of all, you should see an increase in traffic to your site that is coming from both the search engines and the additional backlinks to your website.