Backlinks are essentially the “I-Am-The-Most-Popular-Kid-In-School” philosophy that the major search engines use to determine your site’s credibility. But unlike high school, you don’t need a smoking hot body or the single-season record for most rushing touchdowns to win the online popularity contest, just a little elbow grease and some quality time behind a keyboard.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are simply a link on a particular web page that links to another page. Nothing more, nothing less. See, isn’t this easy?
Backlinks boil down to two varieties: Internal and External.
Internal Backlinks are those that link to another page within the same website. For instance, in my last post I used the example How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur to explain some basic SEO concepts. See how I threw in that blatant link? It points back to my What Is SEO? post. See! I did it again. Now that post has two internal backlinks, how easy is that?
External Backlinks are links that take visitors to an entirely different website. If you came here from another website, then you followed an external backlink (Hi, by the way!).
Why Are Backlinks Important?
As the search engines routinely scour the Internet for random information, they somehow keep track of how many backlinks each site (and even the pages within the site) has. Then they put this information into some crazy algorithmic equation that would make Stephen Hawking himself shudder, and the result is effectively the Internet version of the Homecoming Court.
That’s right, the more backlinks a particular page has, the more attention the search engines give it. Which makes it more likely that your page will appear higher in the Search Engine Results than similar, but less popular, competing pages.
All things being equal, a web page that has a handful of other sites linking to it will probably out rank an identical web page that doesn’t have any other sites linking to it. Again, it all goes back to popularity – and as unfair as it may seem, what’s popular usually gets more love.
Why Do Search Engines Like Backlinks?
Google, Yahoo and MSN love good, original content. That’s what most web surfers are looking for when they search for a keyword or keyword phrase. So it’s in the best interest of these Internet giants to give surfers what they’re wanting.
When a search engine sees that a site or page has a plethora of backlinks, they assume that the content must be pretty darned good. Most people won’t link to a site unless it has some excellent stuff. For instance, if I ran a site about building outdoor fire pits and included a link to www.WhatToDoIfYourHairCatchesOnFire.com, it’s probably because I like that site better than any other site that talks about the same stuff. The search engines see that and give that particular website a point.
The more external links the site gets pointing back to it, the more points it gets from the search engines.
Is That All?
Yes and no. At this point you know the basics of backlinks. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are so many ins and outs regarding these little popularity ballots that I couldn’t possibly begin to include it all on one page.
But fret not, I plan on addressing the intricate details in later updates, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, if you’ve got a burning question about backlinks, leave me a comment.
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