Back Links
Back linking is the process of gaining links from other sites that point towards your site.
When the search engines see a link from one site pointing to another, they consider this as a vote of confidence and this helps the search engines to start gaining more trust towards your site.
Why do the search engines like back links?
When the search engines send out their spiders to evaluate the value and content of the websites on the internet, they firstly look at the content of a site and use the meta tags of websites to learn what they are about, but they need some other indicators to help sort out which of the websites they evaluate provide the best value for the particular search that the are providing results for.
For example, if somebody was searching for the keyword “golf clubs” then the search engines might have found two websites with exactly the same standard of content but if one site has zero back links and the other site has 100 back links pointing to their site from other golf related sites, then the search engines will see that the second site has 100 back links and will perceive it to be more trustworthy and have more value than the first site.
This is a very simplistic way of looking at back links but it should help you get the right idea.
Why Most back links wins:
Now, you know that back links will help you to rank well for your keywords and if your website is setup correctly with good onsite SEO, surely it is just a case of getting more backlinks than your competitors.
Well, not quite.
If you know the right places to look, you can get 100,000s of back links pointing to your site over night but by doing this you can actually get your site penalised and will find that it will never be able to rank for any keywords ever again!
This is not the type of risk you should take!
The search engines are not stupid and know which back links are spammy and which back links are actually genuine. You want the genuine ones.
What back links do search engines like?
There are many variables to take into consideration when the search engines evaluate the number of back links that a website has pointing towards them and they put more weight on certain types of links.
If your website has links pointing to it from other sites in your industry then that is aggod sign because it shows that you are providing enough value on your website for it to be worthy of other sites highlighting your site.
The search engines also have an algorithm that puts a rating on every site. Things like the age of the website and how much quality content that they have provided contributes towards a websites ranking. If a website has a good ranking that it shows that the search engines trust these sites.
If your back links come mainly from these sites that the search engines trust, then this will greatly help with the keywords that you are trying to rank for.
There are many factors in building great back links to your website but this should give you a better idea of what the search engines are looking for.