What is backlink?
From Wikipedia :Backlinks (or back-links (UK)) are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.
In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.
If you know SEO, you must have heard the term ‘Backlink’. Search engine often determine a website page traffic ranking by looking at the number of backlink a website have. Websites often employ various techniques (called search engine optimization) to increase their web traffic by increasing the number of backlinks pointing to their website.
There are several factors that determine the quality of a backlink. If two website backlink to each other, and if their content geared toward a topic, then the backlink considered as relevant and quality. For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.
Anchor text somehow is important for backlink. You can read about Anchor Text here. Anchor text and webpage content congruency are highly weighted in search engine results page (SERP) rankings of your webpage with respect to any given keyword query by a search engine user.
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.
Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to increase web traffic, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly in increasing your web traffic. Lately, however, a search engine's criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.
Building backlink is important to SEO, so it should be very high priority list in your SEO efforts to increase your web traffic.
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