Backlinks are simply links from other sites on the internet which point people back to your site.
The quality of a link from another site depends upon several factors:
- The page rank of the site which links to you
- Page rank is an artificial rank provided by search engines to decide how much authority a particular site has.
- Page rank starts at 0 and goes up as high as 10, with each rank being many times better than the previous rank.
- A single link from a page rank 8 site can be worth thousands of times as much as a link from a page rank 0 site.
- The wording of the link which points to your site
- Getting a link via your sites primary targeted keywords is worth a lot more than getting a link via your store name…unless you are really working for brand recognition.
- If a search engine sees a link to your site with the words "excellent antique books", then it will give you some rank for those words in searches.
- If, however, the link uses the words "Tims Magical Stuff", then search engines will give you some rank for "Tims Magical Stuff". This is still good, but not nearly as good as "excellent antique books" if antique books is one of your sites targeted keywords.
- The type of site linking to your site
- If you get a link from a high page rank site of good reputation, then your sites authority can get a good boost.
- If, however, you get a link from a blacklisted site, your sites authority might actually drop a bit. Typically, however, this isn’t too bad unless you have almost all of your links from sites of ill repute and none from authority sites.
- Whether the link has nofollow set or not
- Links back to your site which have rel="nofollow" in them do not seem to help your page rank, though they do provide a place for more people to find your site from, which is almost always a good thing.
Now that you know what a good link is composed of, you know how to create the best links to your own site when you have the option to choose the links words. This is one of the reasons that I recommend keeping a keyword log for your site handy. If you can get ten good links pointing to your domain which use your targeted keywords, chances are good that your site will soon start showing up on the first page of major search engines for those keywords…provided that there isn’t too much competition for them.
To see a sites page rank in Google, get the Google Toolbar for Mozilla.
And yes, there is a lot more that could be said on backlinks, but the above should be good enough to get started with ranking your site.
