Backlinks raise your ranking on the search engines so the more backlinks to your site the higher you placed for relavent search terms. Most search engines do not consider the hyperlinks as backlinks in ranking. Documents do not only have links going to other documents, but backlinks of documents referring to them. Much as traditional bibliographies tell much about how important a document is, backlinks can describe how important a document is. Put simply, useful documents tend to have many links pointing to them, and documents on one subject tend to link to useful documents on that same subject.

Of course you want the trajectory of your site in the upward direction so what do you do to get backlinks? There are many options to get backlinks like exchanging links for example but here you must also note that a one-way link holds more strength than a two-way link. The safest bet for one-way backlinks is signing up with high quality web directories. A completely clean interface that is easy to search and with no 3rd party advertising you can say goodbye to any disturbing banner ads.

You might wonder why sites provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need content and in return they also provide you for free with something you need quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Backlinks are important to climb the page ranking in the search engines. Backlinks tell the search engines that you have a site of interest to others who have linked to it. Your marketing campaign for your sites, has to include the effort of obtaining links. Links can be bought or you can obtain them for free, simply by listing in directories. Beware though, that submitting to directories takes time, a very tedious task.

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

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.

Please note that quality backlinks and relevant backlinks are two very important considerations for SEO. 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 too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing