Why are back links and linking so important?. Back links provide Google and other search engines with use full information on the products and services that your business provides and also wishes to generate rankings on. Not only does this information provides other avenues to promote your products and services to potential customers and clients it also builds credibility with Google and other search engines.

What is back linking? There are a number of online directories that allow you to list you website address and a brief description on what your business provides within the description. This is back linking, placing your details and a link to your webste onto another website. You can do this by looking for directories that are relevant to the area's of services or products that your business provides. You may have a number of distributors and ask them to place a brief description and link to your website.

How does back linking affect your online search results? The more backlinks and quality of these back links will help increase your websites page rank and credibility with Google hence ranking your website higher in the search results.

What information should you place in your back links? Most online directories or websites that accept back links will allow you to place a description on what your business provides. Ensure that when writting the description for your link that this contains the major key words (products / services that you wish to be found when potential customers or clients are searching for these).

In short Back linking to your website can make the difference in being returned on the first page of search engines such as Google. Remember quality links do not link into websites that have nothing to do with the products or services that you provide and ensure that your descriptions are relevant and are not the same on all back links. Google is not stupid and if you link to a number of irrlevant directories or have same descriptions over and over again this can have a very negative affect on your rankings and in a worst case scenario your website can be black listed (not appear in Google results at all).

More information on Backlinking

For those of you new to Search engine optimization, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important?. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. We hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. The number of backlinks and quality of these links are an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query refer to our article on Pagerank.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to 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. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine's algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine's criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking.


There are a few things to consider when beginning your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site. A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from your site that have been indexed, to name just a few.

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 employsearch engine optimisation techniques to increase popularity and the number of backlinks pointing to their website.