Backlinks are so important to SEO that they have become one of the main building blocks.

What are backlinks?

Basically they are links that point directly back to your website. Some search engines place enormous importance on websites that have that a good number of quality backlinks, because they consider them more relevant than others in their results page, they award them more credit.

Calculating the relevancy of a website site to keywords, search engines take into account the amount of quality links leading to a particular site from other sites. Called inbound links, when they are found on sites which have content related to the site they are linking to, they are considered very relevant. If they are found linking to site with content that is unrelated, they are considered less relevant. Therefore, the higher their relevancy, the greater a search engines perceives their quality. Just as the more relevant the site that is linking back to your site, the better quality the backlink will be.

Search engines like a level playing field and so while it is easy to try to manipulate links for higher rankings, it is not easy to influence rankings using external backlinks from other sites, and this is one reason why backlinks feature so highly in search engine’s criteria for rankings.

Reciprocal linking

Another reason to concentrate on creating quality backlinks is so that you can use them to attract and entice visitors to your site, it isn’t enough to just build a website and ‘hope they will come’. One way to advertise your site is through reciprocal linking. I will link to you and you will in turn link back to me.

Reciprocal linking used to be one of the targets of a search engine filter and were used to boost rankings by sheer force of the inbound links reciprocal link exchanges produced, yet many of these links were not relevant resulting in inbound links being ignored while outbound links were counted. This caused the relevancy of many sites to be watered down and many dropped off search engines maps.

Reciprocal linking can also get you into trouble with a search engine if you are found linking to a bad neighbourhood and the only way to avoid this is to be choosier about who you exchange linking rights with and ignoring those that have tons of backlinks on a page as you want your website to be noticed instead of being lost in a crowd.

Things to consider in your backlink campaign

First of all keep track of them and know exactly what sites are linking back to you. You also have to know how the anchor text of the backlink integrates keywords relating to your site, if at all. There are tools for this.

It not enough to have a large amount of inbound links pointing to your site, you need to have a large amount of quality inbound links and the way to do this is to search for website with similar themes and who are likely to link to you.

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