Backlinks: The Ultimate Search Engine Optimization Strategy

In the world of World Wide Web, backlink is a well known word. With some 150 million websites online, it is not easy to stay on top of all these sites. Traffic for a website comes in many different ways and the traffic from search engines is the most desired.  Unless your site is a popular one like Yahoo or MSN, you have to rely on the search engines for your traffic.  Not only is search engine traffic important, but it will increase your revenue by bringing the right kind of visitors to your website.  That is what we call targeted traffic.  For example, if somebody has a website related to software, it doesn’t do any good getting visitors who are looking for free songs. Each website needs visitors who are specifically in the market for their product, whether for personal or business use. The search engines will help you get the targeted visitors who are specifically interested in your products or services.

It is not easy to be listed on the first page of the search engines for a particular search word or keyword. While it is easy to get indexed in the search engines without any backlinks to your website, it is nearly impossible for a site to get visitors from search engines without backlinks. Search engines will often give greater importance to the sites that have more backlinks, putting those websites at the top of the list. A backlink is shortcut to your website placed in the content of other websites around the world. Increasing the number of backlinks to your site will increase your website’s importance in the search engines. The search engine will consider each backlink to your site as a single credit for your site.  Therefore, more credits means your website is more popular, pushing your website to the top of the list. Google gives more importance to these backlinks than any other search engine.  Other search engines will include content in their website evaluation. However, Google, being the most popular search engine receives 68 percent of the search traffic on the internet. So it is advisable to develop your site in a way that takes advantage of Google’s evaluation technique.

The quality of a backlink is even more important than the number of backlinks. It’s of no use getting a backlink from a website having a lower page rank than yours (Page rank is the score given by Google for every single site according to their popularity).  So before going to get a backlink from a site, the first thing you should check should be the popularity, or page rank, of the site where the backlink is placed. Furthermore, it is wise to get backlinks from sites that cover topics similar to the topics covered on your site. Even though a search engine doesn’t care about the origin of the backlink, getting backlinks from sites similar to yours will help you build more targeted traffic.

Though backlinks are not everything for the success of a website, they are extremely valuable if used properly.  By establishing a large number of quality backlinks to your site, your website traffic will increase measurably.