What are Backlinks? And why are they important to the success of your website?

Link building is an important component of any Internet business, There are many benefits that come from link building. Some of these benefits include direct traffic, more sales and of course, better search engine rankings.

Most search engines use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors in determining the website's search engine ranking. This is why websites often employ search engine optimisation techniques to increase popularity and the number of backlinks pointing to their website.

Not all backlinks are the same
A number of different factors determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authorittive sites on the given topic are highly valuable, and if both sites have content that is relevant to the keyword topic, the backlink is considered 'better' and is believed to have a strong influence on the search engine rank of the webpage granted the backlink. Getting a backlink represents an 'editorial vote' for the reveiving webpage.

Use anchor text effectively
Another important factor is the anchor text of your backlinks. Anchor text is a kind of description of the link should contain information as to what the link contains and it should be relevant to the content on the linked page. Search engine bots will examine the anchor text to evaluate how relevant it is to the content on a given web page. Anchor text and webpage content congruency are highly weighted in search engine results page (SERP) rankings of your webpage with respect to any given keyword query by a search engine user.