When we think of Internet marketing, the word “backlink” doesn’t automatically come to mind. In fact, most people who aren’t involved with a website would not even know what a backlink means. To put it simply, a backlink is any URL link from another website that will take web surfers directly to your website.
So, a backlink is like a business card (in the form of an Internet address) that you gave to someone who then refers other people back to you. Using this metaphor, one can see that the more backlinks you get the more business you get too. However, that’s not the sole reason why backlinks are important in Internet marketing.
While a backlink is a type of referral, it also can be a measure of your website’s reputation. This is why major search engines use backlinks in their search algorithms. They catalogue the number of backlinks and the strength of the people who are backlinking to your site and use this in their algorithm to determine how well you rank amongst other sites that deal with your website niche.
Using backlinks you can raise the visibility of your site by getting your site highly ranked in the search engine. This, in turn, will lead to more people visiting your site and thus more business.
As if that weren’t enough, the backlinks are also used to determine the worth of the website should you decide to sell the domain later. So, backlinks can turn into dollar signs, even if your site happens to be a blog, instead of a full website. That’s how powerful backlinks are!
NOT ALL BACKLINKS ARE THE SAME
Being the Internet, of course, nothing is as straightforward as it seems. It’s simplistic to suggest that anything that is a backlink will enhance your site’s value or search engine ranking. Tech wizards invented the Internet, and many of those geek geniuses ended up in search engine companies.
So, even though a standard HTML URL is easy enough to understand (once you get the hang of it), search engine optimization is quite intricate and often a very secretive business. After all, if we knew exactly the algorithms that major companies use to rank the sites in their listings, than anyone could fool a search engine and the entire industry would collapse overnight.
So, while you can learn as much as you want about how to code a backlink, you probably won’t get the finer points of which backlinks are worth more than others to your website, unless you read this eBook.
You will find out what specific aspects of a backlink are important in Chapter 2 of “Backlinks: Marketing Gold”. There I discuss the importance of the anchor text that is linking back to your site and the types of sites that link to you. This is just one of the elements that can affect your search ranking, but it appears to be a strong criterion in how you rank, at least in the Google search engine.
In “Backlinks: Marketing Gold” you can also learn how the context and positioning of a backlink has a great effect on how useful it is to improve your page rank in search engines. Of course, you will want to get backlinks from sites with good page rank, as they will be weighted more or considered more relevant by the search engines.
The higher up you are in the page listing (home page not necessarily being the best page), the more the backlink is weighted. You will learn why link referral pages are no longer as good a strategy as getting your link on relevant pages with few other backlinks. Also, it may surprise you to learn that where the link appears on the page (top, middle, and bottom) can also influence how strong a backlink it is perceived to be by the search engine-ranking algorithm.
There is of course more to why you need back links. Specifically “One Way” back links, but from this article, hopefully you have learned that you do need to use them. How to get back links and how to use them most effectively you can find in the eCourse, “Backlinks: Marketing Gold” you’ll find linked at the top of this page.