Why back links are important to search engines
The key objective of any web site should be to attract visitors and before you build your web site you should have an understanding of how you are going to attract visitors. It doesn’t matter what content you intend to put on your web pages there can only be one reason for a web pages existence and that is to get people to visit it. You should be focusing the majority of your efforts on getting your visitors from the search engines. Certainly the lowest cost and best targeted traffic will always be brought to you by the search engines.
Search engines stay in business by understanding what the user are searching for and delivering relevant results. The number one goal of every search engine is to attract users and increase loyalty and this can only be done by delivering what the searchers are looking for in a relevant and timely fashion. The more users come back the stronger the search engine brand and the more money they make. The objectives for you and your web pages is precisely the same as the search engines.Acquire users and keep them coming back.
So what exactly must you do?. There are two paths to achieving this and the good news is you can if you have the money do both. You can submit high quality content to the web or you can use advertising often called Pay Per Click (PPC) or in the case of Google ‘adwords’.
Search engines see nothing but keywords or key phrases everything else on the Internet is invisible. Searches always begin with the entry of a keyword or phrase into the ‘search box’. The search engine scans its index of web pages and returns the web pages it has decided are most relevant to the keyword or key phrase. Search engines decide what web pages are returned by using two prime factors – authority and relevance.
Authority is a function of the back links to a web page and relevance is largely down to on page factors such as the number of times a keyword appears on the web page. The order of the list of results displayed by a search engine are conducive with the authority and volume of the back links to each page.
Back links are critical to the quality of the search engines perception of your web pages.
Back links have two major functions – routing traffic to your web pages and helping the search engines determine the ranking of your web pages in the results returned by a user search. Browsers who discover and click on back links containing keywords associated with their interests will be directed to your web pages. This text in the back link is known as ‘anchor text’ and this too is taken into consideration by the search engines. Back links can vary in value.
Back links from web pages that contain content related to your web page have an impact on the authority of your web page.The more authority a web page has the more authority is passed on to you.