What is a backlink?

A backlink is simply what folks click on to get to your website from another website. You'll also hear it called an "inbound link" - generally because it's external to your website and will lead someone to your home page OR an inner page or post.

So, for example, if I dropped Your website link on Facebook or Twitter and someone clicked on it, that's a backlink - inbound to your website.

Content is Still King

Now, that being said. In most cases when we perform our keyword research, we are looking for keywords with decent traffic and low competition. (Fewer competitive websites) And, in doing this, if our content (a page, a post or the entire website) is better than the competitor holding Google's first resulting search page, then we win and take over slot 1. Excellent!!!

But......

Let's say all things are equal. OR, perhaps you decided to go for a real challenge and attempt to set up a website in a highly competitive niche such as Weight Loss or SEO. Both of these examples are very tough to rank pages in. You have to get quite creative.

Going along with either example, let's say you have a keyword and have just published an article on it. Your competitor, or competitors (highly likely) have a similar article. So, if everything else is equal, YOU need an edge to help you rank better than your competition.

Quality Backlinks

One of the things Google, Bing, and other search engines look at is "trust" of your website, age of your domain and high-quality backlinks!

So, how do you determine a quality backlink from a poor backlink. Well, what you want to determine is how decent the website is that you want to place a backlink on. Facebook, Twitter and so on are good. But, these are valued in a certain way via Google. We call these "social signals" and are indeed needed. But, as you know, they are easy to get and Google knows that!.

Gaining a backlink on another website - non-social is a bit different and viewed more powerful in the eyes of Google, Bing, and so on. Especially, if it's within your niche. This builds more "trust" and makes your site look much better to SEO. Additionally, if the backlink is a "DoFollow" backlink - there is a certain amount of "trust flow" transferred from the other website to yours. (A NoFollow backlink tells the search engines to stop. DoFollow does not.)

Free Quick Check Backlink Tool

As I have mentioned before in a previous training, there is a free Moz (one of the most well-respected SEO websites) tool available to perform a quick quality check on any domain:

Moz Toolbar - Page Authority, Domain Authority, MozRank, MozTrust

This tool bar will quickly give you the "Domain Authority" value of any website. The higher the DA, the better.

I run this thing a LOT to check out which sites have solid trust, home page authorty (PA) and overall DA. Page authority on the home page is one thing (lots of backlinks to that single page) but, gaining high DA is much tougher - you need a lot of inbound links to inner pages and posts. This is what builds overall Domain Authority (DA).

Here's a snapshot of the DA on one of my websites: