Backlink Primer Part 1: Introduction To Backlinks And Why You Need Them

Written by Emil Yau Thursday, 26 May 2011 04:15

If you've found this article, you most likely fall into one of three groups:

If you've found this article, you most likely fall into one of three groups:

1) You have a website (probably for business) and are wondering why you don't have any visitors

2) You have a website and have heard that you need to drive traffic by using backlinks but you're not sure what that is

3) Other (what a cop-out for me eh?)

Well, you've come to the right place. In this article I will first explain what a backlink is, how it is used to get more visitors to your website, and then a brief summary of the tried and true methods to build backlinks

WHAT IS A BACKLINK?

Anywhere out on the internet where there is a link to your website that is a single backlink. That could be from somewhere as organized as your local chamber of commerce online directory to something as viral as a youtube clip with your link in the description.

HOW DOES A BACKLINK DRIVE TRAFFIC?

There are two ways that backlinks will send traffic to your site and that is direct traffic and also search engine traffic.

The first and most obvious way is that anyone who sees that link will possibly click on it and thereby visit your website

The second and more important way is that the more backlinks you have, the higher you will rank in search engines. That is the simple version. There is a more complex explanation behind this when you get into the nitty gritty of it but we'll keep to the simple version for now.

Let's give you some examples: Let's say you have a dog training website. Let's also say that there is another website that found your dog training site useful and linked to it. In the first method, the user may find your link on the other site and click on it to visit your site.With the second method, a user might type in "dog training" in a search engine like Google or Yahoo. If Google and Yahoo see a lot of other sites with links pointing back to you, then your site will appear earlier in the rankings. (There is a bit more to it than that, but that's the gist of it).

HOW DOES A SEARCH ENGINE USE BACKLINKS?

Way before search engine optimization was even its own acronym and when netscape and mosaic were the only browsers out there, websites were such a novel thing. The technology was new and exciting and when people found very cool sites they were quick to put a link to them for technology sake.

As the internet grew, search engines started popping up to allow people ways to find things on the internet. Search engines would crawl around everywhere and index pages and take note of which pages got the most links. Algorithms continue to evolve giving different "values" to different links (for example, how authoritative is the page that the link si on?). All of this means that different pages would be ranked differently in search results.

One thing algorithms paid attention to is the "anchor text" of a link. For the longest time anchor text often just was "Click here" (which is not very valuable for search engines). Then people started including words with the links or near the links, such as "Dog Training Manual".

Instead of using

*CLICK HERE* for a great Dog Training Manual

People now use

Click here for a great *DOG TRAINING MANUAL

Search engines really made use of these contextual anchor texts used for the links so it could then give weight to the link knowing it was of a particular genre, such as "Dog Training" (or specifically "Dog Training Manual").

So the key points to the value of a backlink: the anchor text used with the link and the "quality" or "authority" of the page providing the link. And algorithms continue to evolve and give weight to many other factors but this is enough to get you started.

Now that you know what a backlink is and how backlinks are used to drive traffic to your site, you need to know how to build them. Keep an eye out for part two of this article series which will explain why you need to take it upon yourself to build your backlinks and how you should go about doing that task.