Backlinks

If you've read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you've come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, 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. 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.

What are "backlinks"? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also known as Inbound links (IBL's). The number of backlinks is 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.

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. A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality. Quality backlinks are links that are pointed to your website from another place on the internet where the source website’s popularity and traffic is very high. Higher popularity and traffic equals more quality backlink. The New Zealand LEOTC School Camps and Day Activity Directory has a National Google Ranking of #1 and International Google Ranking of #7 for the keywords "school camp" as well as over 60,000 hits per month and rising! This makes us the best source of a quality backlink you will be able to find online.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about LEOTC School Camps or Childrens Day Activities, and received a backlink from The New Zealand LEOTC School camps and Day Activity Direcotry, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about web design. 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.

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. You can easily create an excellent quality backlink to your website by placing a Standard, Premium or Banner Advertisement with The LEOTC School Camps and Day Activity Directory.