Why Backlinks are Important

Backlinks and Why They Are Your Site's Best Friend

SEO, or search engine optimization, consists primarily of two separate components - onsite SEO and offsite SEO. A few years ago, onsite SEO was very important. This was true because the popularity of the Internet was still in it's infancy and because the search engines were also in their infancy in terms of algorithms and rankings. Today things have changed dramatically.

Today, though onsite SEO is still important, the clear king of the hill is offsite SEO and that simply means backlinks and lots of them. If you think about the goal of the search engine, it is to provide the user with the best possible answer to the question or topic entered. If the user types in "dogs" and your site has 300 backlinks to it and your competitor has 30,000 backlinks, who do you think Google is going to see as providing a "better" answer? Of course, things are never that simple. It is not merely and 80's style arm's race to get the most backlinks. There are other important factors as well, such as the relevance of the backlink as well as the quality of it.

You will find many different backlink building services on the web, but you have to be very careful, choosing the wrong one could do you much more harm than good. You need to seek out a reputable SEO firm that you can trust and that only employs white hat SEO techniques. The very last thing that you want to do in your quest to improve your site, is harm it. Backlink growth is something that the search engines look at and it must appear to them to be "natural" so it is very important to not just focus on the quantity of backlinks but on all of the various factors that come into play when designing an optimal SEO strategy for your website. There are many types of backlinks - from blog comments, directory submissions, article directories and many more - and you will need a mix of all of them to be successful in the long run.