What are BackLinks?

Getting Backlinks: The Web-Wide Voting System, and Why You Need Other Sites To Link To Your site or online business.

How do Google decide what order to page-rank websites in search results?  What is the difference between putting a certain website in the number one position, and another website in the 150th position?  And what can you do to get your website nearer to be at the top of the list?

With no knowledge of Search Engine Optimization you may struggle to get your website noticed in search results. This is a very important subject for everyone in business today because you cannot afford to ignore Google as the world's largest source of free web traffic and search engine. Let's take a look at some of the basics.

Google looks at as many indicators as possible to determine how high to rank a website, and these indicators can be divided into two main areas: On-Site and Off-Site.

So there are things you can do on your site itself to get a higher page rank , and there are things you can do elsewhere, on other sites/websites, too. Right now we're going to talk about the most important Off-Site factor: Backlinks.

A backlink is when your site gets a link back from another site. Why are backlinks so important? Because Google sees backlinks as votes. If I linked to your website from mine, which would be like me voting for you, Google would find the link and naturally assume that your site is deserving of it, and reward your site with a higher ranking. So the more backlinks you have aiming at your website the more popular it is assumed you are, and the higher in search results your site will appear. Without backlinks your website may not be seen as important enough to reach a top ranking, because you will be competing with many well-optimized websites.

The whole web is a complex mix of billions of backlinks that Google is trying to make sense of, and it sees each one as an indicator of popularity . Popular sites with a good contents/information have many links from other websites, and poorly made sites with nothing useful to offer have no links towards them.

So if backlinks are so important for search engine ranking, and they indicate to Google (the Web's Greatest Traffic Source Ever) that your website is worth sending traffic to, then a backlink strategy will be needed to form an essential part of your online marketing plan.

Here are some easy ways to get more backlinks:

* Comment on blogs posts on websites related to your topic. There is normally a space under your name where you can put your site link.
* specially in forum discussions, and a good idea is set your website link in the signature.

* Offer to guest post on other people's blogs.

* Build profiles on sites like Squidoo,facebook and Hubpages.

* Publish articles in article directories with your link in your Bio section.

Spending just a little bit of time each week to plant quality backlinks for your site will pay off, and you will soon start beating your competitors to the top spots in search engine results.

It's not hard to do, Start today, just 1 or 2 hours a day will pay off.