In this day and age, the internet is used by millions of people throughout the world. Most of us are fairly proficient in surfing the net to find the information we need, but that is as far as we go. For most internet users, this tool is a wonderful, magical thing that we couldn’t do without, but we have absolutely no idea how it really works.
There is so much terminology involved in the world of the internet that learning it can seem like trying to learn a whole new language. There is a world of words out there that have absolutely no meaning to the average internet user.
One such example is “backlink”, also known as inbound link, incoming link, inward link and inlink. As indicated by its name this is a manner of linking one website with another. It is basically any link received back to a web page from another web page. It is a great marketing tool as a link in. For example, website x can lead directly to your own website, hence directing more visitors there.
Most of us do actually know what a search engine is – you use it for looking up something you want to know and the search engine finds as many sites as possible that contain the words you entered into it. The use of backlinks to a site is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Companies try and get as many backlinks to their site as possible, sometimes even using links on sites that are totally unconnected with them or their line of business. The important thing for them is the link, as this is what leads the internet user to their site.
Search engines have a system of ranking. They send out what are called spiders or bots to search around the net for links to a site. The more links the site has, the more important the search engine assumes it is, and it will therefore appear higher in the ranking than other sites. We all know that when enter search words into a search engine and the results come up, we usually click on the sites that appear at the top of the page first and then work our way down the page. Obviously if a company is trying to get clients, they want their site at the top of the list above their competitors, hence the more backlinks they have the higher up they will rank, and the more visitors they will get.
