Backlinking is often mentioned in discussions about internet marketing because it is one of the ways to get your website seen by your target audience. This is a brief and very basic explanation of what backlinking is and how it works.

To understand how backlinking works, you need to understand a little about how people find information on the internet.

Organic Search Results

When somebody wants to look for information online, they will type a question or a few words (this is known as the “search term”) into a search engine, ie Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN etc.

For most searches there will be more than one result (sometimes the number of results runs into thousands). The search engines strive to present these results in order of relevance and importance.

The most relevant results will be web pages where the exact search term is found, and the next in relevancy are web pages where the words making up the search term are found in close proximity.

For popular searches, there will be many web pages that contain the exact search term, so the search engines use other criteria to decide on the relative importance of each page.

Have you ever wondered why a particular webpage is at number 1 in the search results while another with exactly the same wording is at number 9? The order of display is not random, it is based on many factors. Backlinking is one of the factors.

How Linking Works

A link is created when a website points to a particular web page. An internal link is created when there is a link from one page on a website to another page on the same site. An external link is formed when there is a link from one website to a page on another website. External links are normally referred to as “backlinks”.

The greater number of links “pointing” to a particular web page, the more importance the page will be given by the search engines; the links are like “votes” for the popularity of a web page.

The Value Of Links

If a website has a large number of links pointing to it, the chances of its pages being placed high up in search results are increased. A position anywhere on page 1 is desirable, but the best position is number 1 because the site in first place will receive many more visitors that the other pages in the search results (many more even than the one in second place).

Some links are more valuable than others. A link from a long established authority website will carry more weight than a link from a new website or blog. So, although all links are appreciated, webmasters are always working to get links from high ranking websites.

How to get Backlinks

There are numerous ways to get backlinks. For instance you can pay to have your website included in online directories, you can pay to advertise links to your website, you can make comments on blog posts. The best way of obtaining free backlinks is by writing articles (or having them ghost written) and submitting them to online article directories.

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