What Are Back Links Anyway?
What are back links?
So what are back links and why do we need them anyway? Years ago, Google began determining website importance by giving them a page rank (PR). One of the elements of measuring this importance was by counting the number of links to each website which we call back links. Simply stated, a website that has more back links is viewed as being more important or more popular than one with fewer back links.
What Are Back Links – Establish High Link Popularity
Needless to say, if your website is deemed to have high importance or high link popularity, then Google (and the other search engines) will reward you with higher rankings when searches are conducted for the keywords that your website is targeting.
Notice that we have discussed two different ranking systems here and it is important not to confuse them. The first system we mentioned is the page rank (PR) which is a value of 0 to 10 that Google awards to webpages. Note that every page on a given website will have its own PR. There are many factors that go into how a PR is established which we will address later on.
Back Links Help You Rank Higher In the SERPs
The second ranking system is the search engine results page or SERP. Let’s say that you have a website about golf clubs and one of your primary keywords is “wooden golf driver”. Whenever that search term is entered into a search engine, the searcher is then taken to the SERP for that keyword. The higher you rank in the SERPs, the higher your chances will be that the surfer looking for a wooden golf driver will visit your site. Of these two ranking systems, you should be most concerned with the SERP because this is what determines the amount of traffic that your website will get.
The good news is that your SERP ranking can easily outrank a competitor with a higher PR than you. When you understand search engine optimization (SEO), then you can develop the proper linking strategies, target the right keywords, and create content in such a way that the search engines will reward you for your efforts. After studying the back links of your competitors for a while, you will begin to realize that many of them lack the understanding of basic SEO and can be easily out ranked.
This is very good to you and me, because it can literally take years to get a webpage to achieve a high PR, whereas a high SERP can be obtained in a few months. So when you ask “what are back links?”, you will realize that they are the fuel that gets your website recognized by all the major search engines and helps drive more traffic to your site.
In the next lesson, we will talk about the different types of back links that are available for your use.