If you are interested in making money from the internet, sooner or later you will be introduced to the vital concept of back links. Let’s first assume that you are not intending to pay for traffic but that you want to rank highly in the search engines (primarily Google) for your chosen keywords. This means that when someone types the keywords into the Google search bar, your site will ideally show on the first page of the returned pages that Google finds.

Basically a back link is a link from another site back to your own – hence the term “back link”. The search engines count the number, importance and relevance of back links to assess the quality of site in providing the information for which a searcher is looking. Although a significant number of back links is important, Google and other search engines also place more weight on links from what it considers to be important sites.

The question is “how do they assess the importance of a site?” One way of doing this is to rank the importance of various sites – Google, for example, gives websites a “PageRank” which is a number between 1 and 10. The most important sites are graded as PR 10 and the least important as PR 0, with all others being graded somewhere in between. What this means in practice is that sites with high PR back links will be placed more highly in the search engine rankings.

It follows that if you want to rank highly in the search engines or your search terms then you will need back links. Be under no illusions – the best way is to provide good quality and relevant content on your site. Google’s aim is to provide good relevant content and it therefore makes complete sense to provide the best user experience you possible can by providing useful content on your site. This means that people will link to your site via links on their own sites and Google will count all these as “votes” or back links for your site. Once you have added content you can tell Google that this content has been added and they should come and take a look. This is best done by “pinging” which is just a method of telling Google that new content exists. Our new service will do this for you automatically – check it out here

It is possible to increase the number of back links quite quickly by posting useful comments on other websites (it is better if the websites are relevant to yours) together with a link back to your site. Many sites allow you to do this when placing comments by providing a box in which to enter your websites URL.  It is better to have back links from a variety of sites rather than a large number from just one site.