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We were asked by a potential client the other day - “I know there are a billion factors that go into ranking well in search engines, but if you had to pick one, what would it be?”
Without pause the answer was: “it has to be backlinks.”
High quality, regularly updated content has the most influence in search engine rankings - but what is the measure of high quality content in eyes of Googlebot? Backlinks, a.k.a. inbound links. These “votes” for the quality of your site from other site owners are the most important key to increasing your natural rankings in search engines.
Put simply, backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Search engines consider many factors when analyzing your inbound links. Google and other search engines will analyze the number of inbound links your website has, and also the “quality” of the sites that those links come from, and use this as an indication of how it should treat your pages in the listings. The name of the game is to get as many quality inbound links as you can. The site linking to yours has to be relevant to the keywords and subject matter of your website.
How does your site currently stack up in the inbound linking department? To find the number of links you have to your site, you can go to Google or Yahoo! and do a search for “link:www.yoursite.com”. Click here to see an example of this for our favorite auto racing site. This will bring up a list of sites that link to yours. Google and Yahoo both have tools that show the quantity of inbound links and which pages on your site have the most links. If you want to get really deep we highly recommend Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.
Building your site’s portfolio of quality inbound links can be tough…perhaps we can help!