Website back link development and SEO: Search Engine Optimisation.SEO: Search Engine Optimisation. Website Design, E-commerce website, website hosting, graphic designing, print media, digital photography

Website back link development and SEO: Search Engine Optimisation.

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. 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 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.

Search engine rankings

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website's search engine ranking. For example, Google's PageRank algorithm uses backlinks to help determine a site's rank (the Google Toolbar can be used to view the PageRank of a web page). Therefore, websites often employ various techniques (called search engine optimization) to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website.

Obtaining backlinks from search engines

Most commercial search engines provide a mechanism to determine the number of backlinks they have recorded to a particular web page. For example, Google can be searched using link:wikipedia.org (or link:en.wikipedia.org) to find the number of pages on the Web pointing to http://wikipedia.org/. Google frequently only shows a subset of all existing backlinks to a web page, possibly because of the network costs of providing this information and to avoid exposing the inner-workings of their ranking algorithms. Yahoo!’s Site Explorer and Microsoft's Live Search may give more accurate backlink counts. Google has recently added a new webmaster tool which allows webmasters to view more backlinks to their websites