Not Sold in Stores

People who are new to Internet Marketing (IM) or who have just started a new web-based business may not be familiar with “backlinks,” a very hot term in SEO (search engine optimization) circles. Understanding backlinks is important because they are critical to gaining high search engine rankings on Google.

Those internet marketers who buy paid advertising available through various services do not need to be concerned about backlinks. However, everyone who counts on great, unpaid rankings on Google needs to have their site land high on the first page of a relevant search. This requires skills in utilizing backlinks, a crucial aspect of the more general strategies of search engine optimization and placement. Using these skills is important in building even a new web-based business.

What, then, are backlinks? These are hyperlinks - bits of text that you click on and are taken to another website - that take users back to your own website. Some search engines use backlinks in how they order or rank what they find in keyword searches.

Some of the smaller search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo, use the information and data intrinsic to your website in placing or ranking your site on a list of results. However, Google, which holds a far greater corner on the search engine market, checks the backlinks to your website. This information is then aggregated into Google’s ranking or placement of your site on the results it returns to users.

How does Google use backlinks? Remember that a hyperlink is a bit of text, and you can see that Google can consider that text as part of its search. This is called “anchor text” with respect to the link, and the source of this backlink also holds a certain level of authority or credibility. The combination of the anchor text and the authority of the site with the backlink in it is Google’s data for concluding the ranking of your site.

Of course, this discussion raises the question of how to get or place backlinks elsewhere on the internet. Once upon a time, website owners would approach other webmasters with requests to include links at their site, and etiquette required simply offering to reciprocate.