If you've read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you've come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO.

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as inbound links (IBL's). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

A Backlink (or inbound link, IBL) is a link from someone else's website to your own. Backlinks are one of the most important things to acquire if you want your website to list high in search engines.

These backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page and enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your website. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a website (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another website. Backlinks are also called incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

The principle behind a backlink is very simple. The better your website is, the more people want to create a link to it. Over time, your website will likely acquire backlinks from other sites, especially if you have good content.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

A backlink from a site that has quality content is reffered as quality backlinks or relevant backlinks. Relevant backlinks will hold you in a much better stead than a back link coming from a poorly designed or optimized site or from a site that has nothing to do with the theme of your site. The major search engines such as google see incoming links from relevant sites, and give them more rank compared a backlink from an unrelated site. For example, if you have a website about web design products, your link strategy should target web design related sites.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way and is referred to as backlink bombing.