The goal of most webmasters today is to obtain as many backlinks as possible for their websites by virtue of the fact that these links bestow enormous benefits on their websites. These backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links and inward links.
Why do you want links anyway?
This is because search engines consider each link to be a vote. So each link that points to your website from another website indicates to the search engines that the other website considers your content important. Hence each link is a vote for your site. Backlink is a link pointing to your website from another website. The number of backlinks is one of the indications of the popularity or importance of that website or page.
The importance of these inbound links is that search engines love them and greatly appreciate quality links. There are several important factors that determine the value of a backlink. If these back links are from high page rank relevant sites or authority sites then the credibility of your site increases further. These links help to increase the link popularity and also improve the page rank of your website.
Acquiring more such links will indicate to the search engines that your site is an important site with quality content and classify your site too as an authority site. This will enable your site to appear high in the search results for the relevant keywords or keyword phrases.
How then are these incoming or inbound links obtained?
Webmasters often employ various search engine optimization techniques (known as SEO) to increase the number of links pointing to their websites.
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories and to theme related websites is one of the most popular ways of acquiring these links.
Other smart ways of obtaining quality incoming links to your site is by submitting your website to quality high page rank web directories, leaving useful comments in relevant blogs related to the theme or category of your website and participating in forums where you can leave your signature with a link to your website. A method of obtaining inbound links that has become popular in recent times is to join social networking sites and bookmarking sites.
Another important strategy that can be adopted is to have the backlink as an anchor text with the keyword embedded which helps to increase your rankings in the search engines. Anchor text is the hyperlinked words in a web page. It gives your visitors information about the content of the page you are linking to and also tells the search engines what the page is all about.
All these incoming links will boost the link popularity and the page rank of your website and help your website appear high in the search results. The obvious result of this will be a continuous flow of targeted visitors to your website who are more often interested in what you have to offer. Some of them could become your customers while others could become regular repeat visitors because of the regularly updated unique content you have to offer.
These valuable backlinks play such a unique role that no sensible webmaster can afford to ignore these links and herein lays the secret behind the importance of these links.