This article will help those just starting out and trying to figure out what backlinks are and the importance of them. The article will not help those who already have a fundamental understanding of backlinks, although it is always good to brush up. First of all, I believe in the theory that content is king and should not be replaced by links. When you’re building links, remember that if your content is great, once people visit your website through the links you put out on the web, they’ll be much more likely to offer you links freely, usually without even your permission. query, which is called link baiting, although it is a bit outside the concepts of this article.

If you’re online to make money online or just trying to learn how to promote your personal website or blog, then a backlink should be something you constantly keep in mind. A backlink is a hyperlink that points to a URL and is not on the domain it points to. For example, if you have a blog at blogger.com and put your URL (Uniform Resource Locator which you can find in the address bar when you access your blog in your browser) on a site like digg.com, the hyperlink in digg. com that you placed is called a backlink and it is the deciding factor of which site ranks where in the major search engines after the content has been considered and sometimes even without the consideration of the content if the links from recoil are strong enough.

The driving force behind internet marketing is the backlink, although placing a backlink can sometimes be a bit tricky. When Google scans the web in an attempt to find each and every URL, the more times your link is encountered, the more likely it is to appear in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Now it’s nice to have a lot of backlinks, but you need to know which sites give you a vote (1 backlink = 1 vote from a web presence external to yours). This makes a big difference in how much each vote will count when Google decides how high to place it in its index. The two things Google looks at when deciding on the importance of a backlink or vote is authority/trust and how relevant the backlink is. Now digg.com is a great place to get a backlink and Google trusts digg but the backlink has no relevance unless you are marketing another social bookmarking site so the backlink is half missing of the supreme backlink equation.

These are extremely difficult backlinks to acquire and any good internet marketer should always be on the lookout for potential high-quality, high-relevance backlinks. When I say relevant I don’t mean the category of your website, but the niche of your website, which is a bit broader. For example, if your website is about fishing rods, that’s the category, but the niche is the “fishing” niche and you can get relevant backlinks to websites in categories like fishing theory, fishing tips, line, types of fish, really any and every fishing website should seek cross promotional relationships with these sites. There are many ways besides getting high priority relevant links that you will see advertised and most of these will get you into trouble. Stay away from easy links as most will be link farms (websites created for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity) and stick with websites like yours or websites that have a high Page Rank . You can view the Page Rank of a website by downloading the Google Toolbar and installing it with the Page Rank feature. Regardless, I hope this article has enlightened those who may have been confused by the subject of backlinks and maybe even helped an experienced marketer or two.