What Really Are Backlinks

Hi,
If you are just starting out with running a website, there are plenty of things you will need to learn. For example; it is extremely important for you to learn all about backlinks. In order to gain higher rankings with the search engines and to receive more traffic, you will need to obtain as many of relevant backlinks as you can.

So what exactly is a backlink? It is simply a link another website has to yours. You can basically consider it a vote. The more websites you have giving you backlinks, the more votes you will be getting. As the number of votes you receive accumulates your chances of obtaining a higher search engine ranking increase dramatically.

It is important to note you should be conscious of the type of backlinks you are receiving to your website. Not every vote will be counted equally so to speak. There are a range of factors the search engines take into account when deciding the importance of your backlinks.

One of the first is how popular the website which is linking to you is itself. If the website is well regarded, then Google and the other search engines will hold its vote for your website in high regard. Conversely, they will not place much weight on backlinks coming from relatively unknown web pages.

Search engines also look at the relevance of the backlinks you receive. You should avoid getting a lot of backlinks from sites which are not in your niche. It is much better to have relevant backlinks. If you run a gardening website try to find other websites in the niche to link to your website instead of getting backlinks from baseball or electronics websites.

When it comes to backlinks you should also know what anchor text is. Anchor text is simply the text a visitor clicks in order to visit. If the backlink has anchor text consisting of your main keywords, then it will be much more valuable for your website.