What is a Backlink and Why Do I Need Backlinks?

I received a request for a simple explanation of linking strategy and since other people must have the same question I’ll explain what backlinks are, related terms, and why these concepts matter.

These explanations are intended to be pretty basic, but I remember when the terminology was all Greek to me too.

What is a Backlink?

If you found this page you followed a link from somewhere.  Maybe you saw it in a forum, saw a link on another webpage, or you searched on Google for “What is a Backlink?” and followed the link to here.  A link is just clickable text you can follow to another webpage. The full name for a link is hyperlink, but that term is not used much anymore.  From the perspective of a particular article or website, links that point at the website are termed backlinks.  They are called backlinks because they point back at the article/site/blog.

What is Content?

This blog post  is content. Every webpage, photo, article, video etc on the internet is collectively termed “Content”. Since I wrote this blog post on a blog I own this blog post is my content.  You can publish content, buy and/or sell content, and own content too.

What is Traffic?

I write content so that other people can read it.  In fact I hope that a lot of other people will read my content.  Some of those people will even take some action that benefits me somehow.  People that visit a website are collectively called “traffic”.  We all like traffic to our website.  Traffic is measured in actual humans that visit the article or site in question.

Why do you need backlinks?

The only way you are going to find this post is by following a link to it – either a link served by a search engine or one on another website (or this website – an internal link).   No links, no traffic to see the content, and we are wasting our time.  Say that I create just one poor link that no one sees to this post.  Someone might find the post and read it, but not too many people.

However, say I got a really good link from a high traffic site like… problogger.net.  Lots of people follow that link back to my blog post.  It is just a link to you, but to my content it is a “backlink” because it comes back to my content.

So a good backlink brings my content traffic that found the backlink.  What if my content was so amazing that thousands of people created backlinks to it?  My article would get a lot of traffic from the links right?

Links are like roads or paths to your content.  Think of the phrase “All roads lead to Rome”.  When Rome ruled the known world indeed it seemed like all roads did lead to Rome because Rome built many many roads to the capital city to facilitate trade and movement of armies.   Some of the roads were heavily highways, and others were little footpaths but they all brought traffic to the capital.  If you want popular powerful content that gets lots of traffic you need lots of links (roads) and some nice big wide roads with lots of traffic (links with lots of internet traffic).

What are SERPs?

Why does one website come up before others on a Google search? (we call that SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages).   The answer is partly links.  Google has spiders or robots (bots) that run around the web following links and reporting back what they find.  The information gathered following links includes what a web page is about, what links to it and where it links to.

Imagine the bot comes across some content with just one little link to it.  (like a small town with one road to it).  Google says “this site is not very important”.  Then the bot finds CNN.com and notices “wow a lot of people link to CNN – it must be important”.  So even if the little site with one link and CNN have the same hot story about Sandra Bullock, Google will present CNN at the top of the SERPs because the links tell Google that CNN is really important.

If it sounds like you can never get your content to rank high in the SERPs, don’t think that way.  The first couple links you create are a big deal in Google’s eyes because a lot of content has absolutely no links to it.  Often just a few links can put your content on page one for searches about your topic.

What is Anchor Text?

You may also read about Anchor Text for links.  Anchor Text is just the words used to create the link.  For example I could create a link to one of my Infobarrel articles like this: http://www.infobarrel.com/Is_Constant_Content_a_Good_Writing_Site%3F

without using any Anchor Text.  It is just a raw link (well actually the link is the anchor text by default).  Or I could create some nice anchor text like this:  Constant Content is a good writing site.   Both options go to the same article but the one with Anchor Text tells Google (and humans) what the link is about better than just the raw link.  In my example the raw link also includes the article title so it does a decent job telling what the page is about, but many raw links are not so helpful, and all raw links are not as pretty as proper anchor text.

If you open another window, go to Google and search “Click here” you will find that Adobe Systems comes up #1 in the SERPs.  Why Adobe – you didn’t search for them?  There are a gazzillion websites out there that say “to read this you need Adobe Acrobat.  To get it Click Here.   Google figures that if you want to know about the topic of “Click Here” you likely want Adobe.com because so many people linked to it saying “Click Here”.

We can’t outrank Adobe for the term “Click Here” (and it is a worthless term because no one is looking for Click Here anyway), but I would like people to find this blog when they look for “passive income” because that is the topic.  So I create backlinks that point here that include the words “passive income”.  Eventually Google will start seeing this site as an authority on passive income and present this site to Google searchers looking for “passive income”.  Actually that happens already to some extent since currently this blog ranks #8 for the longer search term passive income blog.

By now you are likely wondering how to get backlinks. Just follow these links:

All Linking Strategy Posts on this Blog.

Tagged as: linking strategy