So what are backlinks? If you’ve been researching how to bring a torrent of traffic to your website you will have no doubt discovered that to be successful you’ll need backlinks to your home page and all the other pages you want visitors to. Backlinks are simply html links to your site from another site, the search engines count these as a sort of vote to the information on your website.

Although in general terms there’s no such thing as a ‘bad link’ to your site are not created equally. The most effective links are from well respected sites which are relevant to your site.

For instance if your website is about cars then a link from any other motoring related website would be of great benefit, the more important that website the bigger the impact on your website rankings. Many people talk of the great effect of say .EDU links from educational establishments primarily because these have a higher trust value than many commercial sites.

Obviously these links are not easy to obtain and it is important to try and attract these via the content on your site. So how do you go about trying to obtain backlinks to your website, well actually you can do it without pestering every webmaster in your particular area of interest.

There are many ways to pick up reasonable backlinks that gradually improve your rankings in the search engines. Ignore most Directories - you can pay lots of money to be included and they won’t bring you any benefit. The most worthwhile ones are Yahoo Business Directory (which costs about $299 a year) and DMOZ which is free but there is no guarantee you’ll get listed

1) Commenting on forums and blogs - if you put your URL in your signature and make intelligent comments and help in these you’ll often get a backlink to your site in return. The only problem with this is that some sites use something called the ‘no follow’ tag which means the backlink won’t count.
2) Writing articles - there are thousands of article directories. Write some useful articles and get them posted on sites like EzineArticles you’ll be allowed to post a link back to your site.
3) Another simple way of getting relevant backlinks to your site is by utilising social bookmarking sites, you may have heard of these they are are used for users to store, manage and share their favourite websites.

Currently the majority of links placed on these sites in relevant categories count as a backlink to your site. Using Social Bookmarking can be an easy way to get a regular source of reliable and respected backlinks. There is an added bonus that you can receive lots of direct traffic from these user sites if your content is interesting - in some instance your traffic can really explode.

I hope this article has help answer the question, ‘what are backlinks’. The simple fact is that your site will never receive significant search engine traffic without these links.