The Basics of Backlinks

This article will help those starting out and trying to figure out what backlinks are and the importance of them.  The article will not help those who already have a fundamental understanding of backlinks though it is always good to brush up.  First and foremost I am a believer in the theory that content is king and should not be replaced by linking.  When you are building links remember that if your content is great than once people visit your website through the links you place on the web they will be much more likely to offer you links freely usually without even your consultation which is called link baiting though it is a little out of this articles concepts.

If you are online to earn money online or are just trying to learn promotion for your personal website or blog then a backlink should be something constantly on your mind.  A backlink is a hyperlink pointing to a URL and is not located on the domain it is pointed towards.  For example if you have a blog on blogger.com and place your URL (Uniform Resource Locator which you can find in the address bar when you access your blog on your explorer) on a site such as digg.com the hyperlink on digg.com which you placed is called a backlink and is the deciding factor of which site ranks where on major search engines after content has been considered and sometimes even without the consideration of content if the backlinks are strong enough.

The driving force behind internet marketing is the backlink though placing a backlink can sometimes be somewhat tricky.  When Google scours the web in an attempt to search out each and every URL the more times they come across your link the more likely you will come up within the SERPs (search engine results pages).  Now it is good to have a lot of backlinks, but you should be conscious of which sites are giving you a vote (1 backlink = 1 vote from an external web presence to yours).    This makes a big difference on how much each and every vote will count when Google decides how high to place you in their index.  The two things which Google takes into account when deciding on the importance of a backlink or vote is the authority/trust and relevancy which the backlink holds.  Now digg.com is an excellent place to grab a backlink and Google does have trust for digg, but the backlink does not have relevancy unless your marketing another social bookmarking site so the backlink is missing half of the supreme backlink equation. 

These are extremely difficult backlinks to acquire and any good internet marketing expert should always be on the lookout for possible high quality highly relevant backlinks.  When I say relevant I do not mean the category of your website, but the niche of your website which is a bit broader.  For example if your website is about fishing poles that is the category, but the niche is the “fishing” niche and you can gain relevant backlinks for websites in such categories as fishing theory, fishing tips, fishing line, types of fish, really any and every website about fishing you should be seeking a cross promotional relationships with these sites.  There are plenty of ways besides gaining relevant high priority links which you will see advertised and the majority of these will get you in trouble.  Stay away from any easy links since the majority will be link farms (websites which creation was for the sole purpose of boosting link popularity) and stick with either websites like yours or websites which have a high Page Rank.  You can see a websites Page Rank by downloading Google’s  toolbar and installing it with the Page Rank feature.  Anyway I hope this article has enlightened those that may have been confused by the subject of backlinks and perhaps even helped an experienced marketer or two.