In it’s simplest form, a backlink is a link from one website which points to another website. When site A points to site B, site B has received an inbound link called a backlink.
Backlinking for SEO is part art and part science. Do you recall how kids always choose which other kids were the most popular in school? On the web, robots, spiders and web servers dictate which websites are most popular for a given search term.
Think of backlinks like a big popularity contest for robots, and the backlink itself is a vote for a website.
With that in mind, we move onto the concept of backlinking for SEO. In terms of a way to influence the SERPs (search engine result pages) backlinks can be a powerful indicator for the search engines which web pages are most popular for a given keyword term.
Search engines such as Google have been known to use over 200 different “signals” when determining authority for a given site in terms of ranking for a particular keyword, and while on-page SEO and other factors are certainly determining factors, backlinks in my opinion could be the single most important factor to ranking a website for a given keyword term.
Let’s take a quick look at an excerpt from Google’s Help Docs: “Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity…It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. ”
Disclaimer: Backlinks are powerful tools to help you achieve first place rankings, but there is also an element of risk that you should be aware of before embarking on a backlink campaign.
Certain types of backlinks can actually hurt your legitimate efforts. For example, “Link schemes” are frowned upon according to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. They state:
“Examples of link schemes can include:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank”
When creating a backlink strategy for your SEO campaign, I suggest adhering to Google’s published webmaster guidelines for link building and exploring well-balanced backlink strategies that can be equally powerful. Those guidelines can be found here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
One final thought, you may consider using buffer or test sites until you are comfortable with the process of building backlinks and their effects on your sites in SERPs.
Leave a comment below and let me know if you’d like to know more about backlinks or another topic.
