Backlinks - A Brief Overview

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Backlink indicates a link from another site to your website. These are also knows as Inbound links (IBL's) and their number indicates the popularity of the website. Backlinks are considered as votes by search engines: more the number of votes (backlinks) your website has, and based on the importance of websites linking back to yours, your site is assigned a trust rank. The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or a webpage. The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better it is.

Importance of Backlinks:

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website's search engine ranking, popularity and importance. Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page X to page Y as a vote, by page X, for page Y. Knowledge of this form of search engine rankings has fueled a portion of the SEO industry commonly termed linkspam, where a company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to their site regardless of the context of the originating site. Search engines are looking for the websites which have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites.

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. This is also a reason why backlinks factor is highly significant into a search engine's algorithm.

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Learn the ABC of SEO - Part 1

SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) is a powerful web marketing technique by which a website can rank better than other websites on a same keyword. A normal user like me or you always prefer to click the results that appears to be in the first page or in simple words we can say that 95% of users click only top 5 results (websites).  To rank better on your keywords you have to use this technique known as SEO.

There are many factors which affect your ranking but firstly we should know the basic thing. The most basic thing that we should know is how search engines are going to index/rank us in their database.

How search engine index/ranks your website?

Daily thousands of website are launching so it is very difficult for a search engine to manually manage all the websites and index it in their database. To solve this problem they have developed their own software called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google).  Initially search engine crawls the web page (basically scans the webpage) and note down the important things or tags and then index it in database.

It is important to understand that search engines are not human and they can't see the beauty  of the webpage, so if you are using Flash, animation, videos or any other fancy items it won't help you in getting indexed or rank better in search results. We need to keep the basic things right and that is the only key to gain popularity for your website.

In next post I will let you know about various different techniques about getting indexed in google or any other search engine.

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