The importance of backlinks

If you rely on search engines to generate visitors to your website, then backlinks are vital.
The most successful websites have the most backlinks of websites in their topic.

Why are backlinks important?

More backlinks give a webpage better search engine position. When you perform a search engine search many web pages matching your search query are returned. The web pages at the top of the results are considered by the search engine to be those most likely to help you find the information you require. Many factors are considered when determining which web pages to show at the top of the results. One of the most important factors is the number of links that point to those pages.

Each link from a webpage to another webpage is considered a vote for that webpage. With so many websites using tricks and with so low-value websites around, search engines have to be clever in determining which websites are of importance, and which are not. When a web page has many links, from other websites, pointing to it, it is a good bet that the information on that page is of high quality. Search engines combine the inbound link count, with other information about the website, to determine its value when formulating search results.

The more backlinks a webpage has, the higher it will appear in search engine results. When performing a search engine search, the webpage at the top of the results normally has the greatest number of inbound links. There are a few other factors that are considered also.

Do you need more backlinks?

If you are reading this I am assuming that you have a website, you know the purpose of your website, and that you know the keywords your website and webpages are targeting. If not then read the SEO summary. If so, then how do your webpages perform in search engine searches? Most SEOs structure their websites so that each page is targeting a specific keyword or keyword phrase. The SEO goal is for each of these pages to appear at the top of the search engines, particular Google, when a search for that keyword or phrase is entered. Most SEOs will continue with their SEO campaign until each webpage is the top of the search. Good SEOs will continue to apply SEO even after the webpages are top for their keyword searches.

So, do your webpages appear at the top of search engine searches? If not then you need to apply SEO. One of the most importance factors of SEO is gaining more backlinks.

How to gain backlinks

Gaining more backlinks is relatively easy. It takes time and persistence, but you can achieve good results, especially if you formulate a link building campaign.

The benefits of backlinks

The biggest benefits of backlinks are:

• Increasing your search engine position for keywords or phrases - see above
• Increase your visitors as people follow your links found on other websites - people do follow links of course
• Cause your website to be indexed and crawled by search engines - when starting a new website, search engines will index your new site, once a link to it is found on an existing website. This is the easiest way to get a new website added to a search engine index.
• Increase brand awareness for your name or business name - the more people that see and hear your website brand, name or URL, the more people will visit and remember your website.

Building backlinks, if done properly, can increase your website traffic significantly. It doesn't have to be hard, simply do a little at a time and you may be surprised with the results over a short period of time.