Are Backlinks Vital for SEO?

by Jon Brown | 3rd October 2009

by Jon Brown

Anyone who has looked into getting their website optimised for search engines will more than likely have come across the term backlink. A backlink is a found on other people's websites, and are hyperlinks that link back to your website. Search engines look for these backlinks to determine the relevance of a website. The example usually used to highlight the importance of backlinks is the search term "click here". If you look in google or yahoo for this term you'll no doubt find Acrobat Reader at No 1. So how can it rank so highly for a keyword term that is of no obviously relevance?

Take a look on the Acrobat Reader site... Serch for the term click here. I don't think it even appears once on their site, but the reason Google thinks this is the most relevant page for that keyword is because millions of websites all over the world have a backlink to this site with the anchor text of "click here". Search engines therefore deduce that Acrobat Reader's site has to be the most relevant for this search term.

What makes a good backlink?

So now you have seen that search engines use backlinks, so what makes a good backlink? Well, a backlink from a website that Google trusts is far more important than a backlink from a website that Google doesn't trust. Therefore, backlinks from websites with a higher page rank are more important. If you can get a backlink from a website like Wikipedia for example, this would be considered a lot better than from a website that Google doesn't know about.

Google also considers the quantity of backlinks, although this may not be as important as quality. The truth is, nobody really knows the Google algorithm.

In addition to quality and quantity of backlinks, the website that a backlink comes from should be relevant to the website its pointing at. For example, if someone puts a backlink on a car auction website that points to a travel company, the two websites are not relevant to each other so Google will put less weight behind the link.

How do you get backlinks?

Backlinks can be generated by blogging and writing articles where you put in the resource box at the end a couple of backlinks. Additionally you can buy backlinks or ask other website owners to post a couple on their website. By ignoring backlinks you will be at a significant disadvantage and will probably not rank well in Google. But by getting a lot of backlinks you can do very well and even end up on Googles first page of results.

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