What the Heck are Backlinks?

Any website owner who has ever gotten to any of the technical details of their website has come across the term “Backlinks”.

In the world of search engine optimization, or SEO, the term is thrown around a lot and often is not well explained.

What I want to try to do is just take the mystery out of it, by putting it into the form of an analogy.

Backlinks – Your Connections in the Internet

The term Backlinks describes links or connections from someone else’s website back to your website. That’s why they are called “Back Links”.

The idea of it is simply this: In the internet, the more connections that exist between websites, the more the search engines see them and rank them. And what that means is that if many, many other websites are linked to your website, the search engines look at your site as being more important.

Not all Backlinks are Created Equal!

If the links coming back to you are very, very qualified sites, what we refer to as “authority sites”, then that ranking goes even higher. Some of the most popular backlinks that people seek to get are from the “.edu” sites and the “.gov” sites.

For those of you who are not familiar with that terminology, any website that has “.edu” at the end instead of “.com” or “.org”, is a website from an established education institution, i.e. a college or a university. The “.gov” is a backlink from an established government website.

Now, whether you believe that all education institutions or government institutions are really authorities on what they say and do, the search engines consider them that and their backlinks carry a lot of so-called link juice.

So, if you have someone at a university who has connected to your website, posted an article you’ve written on their website, or you have an article from them on their website, and that link exists, the search engines look at that and say, ”This person must be pretty good at whatever they do because here is an authority site that is linked to them”.

The idea being that those so-called “authority sites” would not have anything to do with you, if they didn’t think you were somehow credible. And credibility is one of the things that every site owner wants to achieve in the eyes of both the search engines and of the site visitors.

Backlinks – Your Online Rolodex

Let me make an analogy to a different business construct. How many people have your business card in their Rolodex, and how many business cards do you have in yours? That’s a type of back linking that many people are familiar with.
Or here is a social analogy: How many people have you on their A-list for important functions? That obviously makes you, in the eyes of many people, a very important person. If, for instance, you get an invitation to a state dinner at the White House, you are pretty high on some very key A-lists.

This is what we are looking for in the internet as well. How can we get you on very, very important “A-lists”, so that the search engines put you high up in the rankings in the search results when someone starts looking for what you have as a product or a service. Backlinks get you on these lists.

Getting Backlinks is not Difficult – If Done Right

Getting these backlinks is not difficult, but it can be time consuming. It can be done by you spending a fair amount of time looking at forums and groups and blogs that discuss your industry, your products and your services. And as you see these various postings, you make comments, you add to the so called conversation on the blogs or forums.

If you do it well, those blog owners or forum moderators, or the people reading them, begin to notice you as someone who adds value to the conversation.

On most any blog or forum, you are allowed to have what is called a “signature line”. That signature line may not be your website displayed openly, but it may be something called “anchor text” which is just your name with a link to your website underneath it.

So, if someone is interested in who you are, they can click on that link and it lands them on your webpage. Now you have a visitor who is coming to your site because they are interested in what you do based on what they have read on someone else’s blog or forum.

If you make very good comments and really add to the content of the blog, the blog owner themselves may start contacting you to find out who you are, to find out more about you and, in an ideal situation, you can get into sharing posts. In other words, they ask you if you would mind writing a guest article for their blog, or you might do the same for them.

But, there are some costly link building mistakes you do want to avoid.

You Scratch my Back, I’ll Scratch Yours

Every blog owner wants to have fresh, good content all the time, but they don’t always have the time to write it themselves. So, bringing in someone from the outside who is credible, not only saves them time, but also adds to their backlinking and to their credibility and their authority.

This is kind of the proverbial “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. But on the internet, creating great backlinks is one of the most valuable techniques that you can master, or one of the most important techniques to outsource.

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