Backlinks are also called inbound links and are links that are directed to your website for efficient search engine optimization. In fact, the number of backlinks your website generates indicates your website’s popularity and importance with search engines.

Google too appreciates websites with more quality backlinks and consequently, consider them better for use in search queries. However it should be remembered that it is not enough to just have a large number of backlinks to your site. The links your site generates should be quality links.

In other words, the backlinks to your site should have content that is relevant to the content on your site. In fact, the quality of links to your site is determined by the relevancy of inbound links to your site. So if your site provides information on cosmetic surgery, it’s of no use linking to a site about cat allergies. These links are considered irrelevant links to your site, and are not quality links.

Backlinks help get a better page ranking

Backlinks also help your site get a better page ranking than trying to influence search engines with external backlinks from other sites. This is the main reason why backlinks are so important in search engine algorithm.

Of late, search engines have provided stricter criteria for qualifying inbound backlinks. This is mainly because there is an increasing number of people who use deceptive search engine techniques like hidden links and automatically generated pages that only generate links to other web pages to increase the number of their website inbound links.

These web pages that generate links are called link farms which though aren’t ousted from search engines, can be harmful for your site if you have backlinks with them. In fact, their links can also lead to the banning of your site.

This means that you have to find relevant sites worth linking with, locate sites that don’t have that many outbound links to its pages and sites that don’t use any bad seo techniques. All this ensures you don’t end up linking with the wrong sites.

Helps attract visitors

The greatest benefit of having quality backlinks in your site is that it helps attract visitors to your site. It’s not enough to just create a website to create an online presence. You should be able to generate traffic to your site, which is made possible through backlinks.

There are various webmasters who own and run more than one website. In fact, sometimes these sites are related to one another. However if you too own various websites, you have to be careful while interlinking all these sites using the same IP address.

This is because creating backlinks by having too many links with the same IP address is considered backlink bombing, and looks bad to search engines. However at times using the same IP address like for providing visitors with extra resources is okay. However make sure you keep these links to a bare minimum.

Anchor text plays an important part in creating quality backlinks to your site where a link incorporates a keyword in the hyperlink text. So instead of using the words ‘click here’ you can use words relating to your site for links.

How to generate backlinks

There are various means of receiving lots of backlinks to your site in as short a time as possible. They include using press releases, blog comments, article submissions and social bookmarking. You can also use the help of a third party pinging service which lets search engines know that your site has an anchor text pointing to your site.

Search engines like these pinging services as they inform search engines of new content getting added to a site, wherein the search engines send crawlers to index this content.

Submitting RSS feeds to important RSS directories also help in increasing backlinks to your site as search engines are forced to acknowledge backlinks in these directories. This in turn ensures higher page rankings for your site and consequent better traffic.

Remember that you don’t need to spend money on expensive software to get high page rankings and backlinks. You just have to be constant at building backlinks and indexing, doing it at least once a week to slowly increase your website’s page ranking.

However don’t expect backlinks to improve your page ranking overnight. It takes time; but with consistency and hard work, you will soon see a marked improvement in your website rankings because of the backlinks generated to your website.