After researching search engine optimisation you will more than likely have come across the term “backlink”. Backlinks are basically hyperlinks that link to your website from another. Search engines put use these backlinks to find out how relevant your web page is for a particular search term. For example, type the keyword term “click here” into Google. I bet the number one result is Adobe Reader, right? How can this be the case?

If you examine the Adobe Reader website you’ll probably not find the phrase “click here” anywhere on it. The reason you won’t find it is because it’s not there… so why does Google think it’s the most relevant site for this keyword? Well, the answer is straightforward – millions and millions of websites link to this site with the anchor text of “click here” and because so many sites all do this, Google thinks that this site HAS to be the most relevant for this term.

What’s a good backlink?

So we have proven that search engines put a lot of weight behind keywords, but the quality of the backlinks are also checked. Backlinks that come from websites that have a high page rank (i.e. Google considers them good websites) are a lot more important than backlinks from pages with low page ranks. A backlink from the BBC website for example is worth a lot more than a backlink from a website that was created yesterday.

Google also considers the quantity of backlinks, although this may not be as important as quality. The truth is, nobody really knows the Google algorithm.

Another thing to note is that search engines look at the relevance between websites. If there is a link from a website about SEO and this links to a website about cars, there is little relevance here and Google will probably consider the backlinks low quality.

How can you get backlinks?

Backlinks can be generated by blogging and writing articles where you put in the resource box at the end a couple of backlinks. Additionally you can buy backlinks or ask other website owners to post a couple on their website. By ignoring backlinks you will be at a significant disadvantage and will probably not rank well in Google. But by getting a lot of backlinks you can do very well and even end up on Googles first page of results.