Backlinking - Its Function And Importance for Traffic
What is the meaning of the word backlink? It is a chunk of text, or even a picture, that joins two websites, pages or even sections within the same page. The page you are now reading no doubt has many of them. They are normally highlighted in blue and underlined. Strictly speaking I have just described a link. Backlinks are links that point back to a website. They are very useful for webmasters, the managers of websites, because they allow people to visit their site. Before the creation of search engines they were the only way internet users had to find a specific site.
What is their significance? They are very valuable to website owners for various reasons. First they show that other readers and webmasters are interested in their site enough to recommend it to their readers. Second it is an avenue for more people to read their pages. Thirdly it is one of the factors that search engines take into account when deciding what Page Rank they give a particular page.
At this stage you might be asking yourself what a search engine is. It is simply a website that is used to search for certain keywords in the whole internet. This is a huge task, some have estimated that the internet has over 100 trillion words. Search engines have to sift through all those words and pages to try and find the best match to a users search. This is done by the use of a formula that computes the content of a page, its relevance to the keywords in the search, the number of links a web page has and the quality of the site as a whole. The final value this formula provides is called the Page Rank.
But, what is a search engine? I hear you ask. Search Engines are amazing pieces of code that allow users to search for specific words or series of words among the ocean of information the internet is. Without them we would have to hear about a specific site and know its address in order to read its information. Search engines make web browsing and searching much easier.
Each one counts as a vote to a site, the more votes you have the more chances you have of appearing at the top of search engine results pages. Another important aspect is that the text that is used to create the link is relevant to the keywords in the search.
For example if an internet user does a search for monkey astronauts and your site has hundreds of links with the words monkey astronauts in them you have a good chance of appearing at the top of the search list.
Anchor text is composed of the words you must click on to navigate from one page to another. A link will be much more valuable for a search engine if it contains anchor text that describes the content and agrees to the keywords used to make the search.
As you can see, increasing the backlink volume to your site is crucial if you want to increase the number of visitors to your site. Which, let us face it, is what all webpage owners want.
Mike Gates is an online marketer and recommends HostGator for hosting. HostGator is the cheapest web host. Use hostgator coupons to get discount at the time of sign up.
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