Everybody keeps talking about backlinks. What are they? A backlink is a html link from another site back to your site. They are significant because of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is the practice of making your websites search engine friendly. These incoming links may be pointed to your sites home page or they may be pointed to internal pages (called deep linking) for the purpose of increasing the popularity of a specific section of your website.

In the world of backlinks, quantity is important. However, quality is also important. The more backlinks you have then the more the search engines trust your content. Google's more recent algorithm updates have included the importance of quality when referring to the page that the link is coming from. It used to be that you could go out and get 1000's of links and rise to number 1 in the search engine result pages (SERP's). But, that is no longer the case. Now you need to be more natural with your backlinking strategy.

Google uses the backlinks that it finds on the Internet pointing to your site to calculate a value called the PageRank (PR). Every page in your site has a pagerank, even if it is 0. Pagerank is one of the many factors that are used in the Google search algorithm and it's importance has seemed to diminish over the last couple of years. We do know that even if you pagerank has become less important, backlinks themselves are still very important.

Other terms for backlinks are incoming links, inlinks, inbound links, and inward links.

Backlinks can be used for more than just PR calculation and SERP's. You can find related websites that have linked to you without your knowledge (or permission), gauge your sites popularity compared to another site, and view what others have written about your site/pages. While everyone always talks about getting links for Google SERP's placement, Yahoo gives a much better actual list of backlinks.

Google's reasoning for only showing a subset of the backlinks that it knows about for your site is to protect their search algorithm. Also remember that many times, the page that has your backlink will not show it's true PR because the page hasn't been through a Google PageRank update yet.

When another site links to your site, they are basically voting for yours. But that vote is no longer the only thing looked at. The major search engines are also looking at the content and context of the link to determine relevance to your website. If the page containing the backlink has little to no relevance than the link will not be weighted as heavily when the link is counted.

When you are trying to get more backlinks to your site, there are a number of different methods to gain those links. Some of the more effective ones are :

1. Web Directories

2. Website Link Directories (some are paid and many are free)

3. Comments in forums and blogs

4. Buying home page or site wide links - not recommended unless it is in context

5. 1 way or reciprocal link exchanges - 1 way links are much more desirable

Tip: Don't just worry about getting backlinks from high PR sites. A natural pattern of link gathering would be to have more links from lower PR sites because of their sheer quantity when compared to high PR sites.

The wanted result of getting all these backlinks to your site is to increase the natural search engine traffic that is directed to your site by being on the first page of the SERP's. But you should also see some traffic that comes to your sites through the backlinks themselves. So, when getting backlinks, you want to keep the reader in mind and try to make it enticing for the reader to click your link because there is something on the other end that they need.