What is a backlink? It’s a question I’ve been hearing lately on internet forums. This is an important question for several reasons that I hope to explain in this article.
What is a backlink?
It is an incoming link to a website or blog. Let me explain with an example, because that definition is as clear as mud! Let’s say you have a blog and you have a myspace page. You want your myspace friends to know about your blog, so you put a link to your blog on your myspace page. That is a backlink to your blog. It works the same if you direct people to your myspace page from your blog as well. The concept is really easy. It gets a little trickier when you start talking about why they’re important because then you need to know a couple of other technical terms, like search engine optimization and page rank.
Let’s take them one at a time.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is taking steps to naturally or organically increase the volume and quality of traffic received from search engines. In other words, taking steps to get your website to appear at the top of the list of returned websites when someone Googles your keyword. This is also known as the search engine results page or SERP. It is a combination of SEO and backlinks that will increase your page rank. What is a Page Rank you ask?
Page Rank is simply a number that Google gives to your page based on how important they feel it is. Google decides this number based on several factors, including, you guessed it, backlinks.
Why should you care about page rank?
Page Rank is a crucial part of the equation when it comes to deciding how high you rank on the search engine results page. A site with a higher page rank will appear higher in the list than a site with a lower page rank. We all know how much traffic a site that appears on page one of Google can get, and while it can be a difficult task to accomplish, however, an easy way to help your site move forward is with backlinks.