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?

Take a look on the Acrobat Reader site… Serch for the term click here. I don’t think it even appears once on their site, but the reason Google thinks this is the most relevant page for that keyword is because millions of websites all over the world have a backlink to this site with the anchor text of “click here”. Search engines therefore deduce that Acrobat Reader’s site has to be the most relevant for this search term.

What Makes a Good Quality Backlink?

With the previous example you’ll hopefully see that backlinks are very important. Howwever, you can get different qualities of backlinks… Backlinks that come from pages that Google considers important (those with a high pagerank) are more important than those that Google doesn’t consider important. If you could get a backlink from the BBC website or Wiki this would be a great quality backlink.

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.

If a backlink points at a website that is relevant to the site it comes from this makes a better backlink. A dog owners website pointing at a pet website is probably OK, but a building company’s website pointing at a computer manufacturing website is not.

How can you get backlinks?

You can get backlinks via a number of places – posting articles on websites, writing blogs or replying on forums, all these places can allow you to leave a signature, and within this you may be able to create one or two backlinks. If you ignore backlinks you will probably not get a good ranking, and if competing websites get a lot, you’ll be at a disadvantage.