Understanding Backlinks
Inbound and Outbound Links
The links on a site represent the relationships that site has with other sites. A site with no incoming links or outgoing links will have receive no organic traffic – ever. Even if you have the most valuable content on the internet published on your site, if you have no incoming links, you’ll never receive traffic because there is no way for other sites to find you.
Outgoing links are a resource for your readers. Linking to your sources is important for at least four reasons: verifiability, acknowledgment, examples, context. However, having only outgoing links is not a good thing either. What a site needs is to have a balance of both incoming links and outgoing links.
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. A backlink is created when another site or a blog links back to your site, and the value of that backlink is related to the PR ( pagerank) of the site linking back to yours. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as Page Rank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.
In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node . Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.
If you want high search engine rankings so your blog will receive more organic traffic it’s important to have backlinks. Google ranks your site from 0 to 10 based in part on the PR of sites that link to yours. If you have backlinks from high PR sites then Google will rank your site higher in search engines results, and as your site gets more backlinks Google will see your site as one of increasing importance. This will be reflected in your blog’s PR. The more quality backlinks your site has the higher your Google page rank will be..
Quality, quantity and relevance of backlinks
Search engines consider content of the sites to determine the quality of a link. When incoming links from other sites with content related to your site, they are considered to be more relevant to your site than those coming from site with unrelated content. When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of quality incoming links to that site.The higher the relevance of incoming links the greater their quality will be.
A backlink could be considered as a quality backlink if:
· The content of the backlinking site is the related to your same as your website.
· It links to your website with the keyword (keyphrase) that you are trying to optimize for.
Backlink checkers
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, and more.
1. http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
Or just Google for more back link checker tools
References:
10 Tips For Getting Backlinks