What Are Backlinks – What Is a Backlink?

What are backlinks?

If you own a website then you may have heard of backlinks. In this article we’ll describe what is a backlink. If you’re asking that then you probably don’t know about their importance to the ranking of your site. Backlinks are exactly what they sound like, a clickable link that is aimed to return potential clients back to your website when they run across them in another location. Some of their other names are “incoming links“, “inbound links”, “inlinks” and “inward links”. Yes, for a new one in the internet will surely be wondering what are backlinks?

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are vital to the success of your website because you need them to get a higher page ranking with Google. With the recent changes, due to the Google Freshness Algorithm, this is even more vital since Google is now indexing content faster if it is more current and up-to-date than someone else’s site content. Therefore, when site owners wonder what are backlinks good for, the answer is: they could mean the difference between success and failure to get traffic and that means the difference between getting visitors, and therefore potential customers, to your website or not.

Where do backlinks come from?

When it comes to answering the question, what are backlinks, you need to know that there are several types. A backlink can originate from another page on your own website, or it can be a link that is listed on someone else’s site that leads back to yours. Google ranks backlinks differently dependent upon where they originate. That means you want quality backlinks that link to your site from a trusted site like a .gov or an .edu if possible, or at least a page/site that has something to do with the topic of your niche.

Backlinks are an integral part of search engine optimization (SEO) and they should be kept as fresh and as current as you can manage. In order to do that you have to pay attention to current trends and add several new backlinks on a monthly basis. If your site continuously adds new backlinks that come from valuable sites other than your own, then this shows that you are an authority within your niche and it helps build your site’s credibility faster.

Social Media influences backlinks

Building superior backlinks is tremendously significant to SEO and needs to be high up on your list of things to check off when you are updating your sites.  Knowing the answer to the what are backlinks question and how you can best exploit them to get your site ranked higher is a skill that is vital in today’s fast paced computer age world where the trends are ever-changing.  Sites, like Twitter and Facebook, that offer users instant communications on a real time basis are excellent examples of this.

How does a site get quality backlinks?

Webmasters use several means to get backlinks for website. Some are free, while others are available for a fee. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing look for the backlinks that have been naturally created. This sort of thing plays heavily into Google’s ever changing algorithms when answering the question, what is a backlink and how do I get good ones for my site(s)?

Some webmasters may try to overload the system with tons of backlinks or use link farms that automatically create pages of backlinks to their sites. However, in the end, Google will discover this sort and classify it as SPAM. It is much better to get your backlinks through places like blogs and websites related to or that compliment your niche, (i.e. if your site sells peanut butter, you could get a backlink from a site that sells jelly), or similar locations.

You can also get what are called reciprocal links by sharing links between websites with other webmasters, which means you have a link to their site and vice versa. As long as the site you have a link to is an appropriate and valuable site, this is good. If it is a link just to have a link, then it’s not and could count against your page rank.

Keep track of your site’s backlinks

Another vital tool in figuring out what is a backlink’ importance is keeping track of all of your links. You probably will eventually end up with dozens, even hundreds of backlinks and it’s a good idea to have a way of tracking them. There are several webmaster tools you can choose from to be able to track your backlinks.

These include Yahoo Site Explorer/Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Tools, Link Diagnosis, Open Site Explorer, and SEOBook Backlink Analyzer to name a few of the top rated ways of tracking backlinks for your sites.

Conclusions

All in all about what is a backlink, building backlinks can be a time consuming task, but they are vital to your website’s ranking, and therefore in you getting traffic and those ever important clients/visitors to your sites. Therefore if you have a good strategy for forming them, you can answer the question, what are backlinks, by smiling and saying, they are an important part of my SEO strategy to become the number one ranked site for my niche.