Are you just beginning to think about starting your first website? Are you new to online marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO)? It may be that you already appreciate how SEO works and you may perhaps just wish to augment your Google ranking and increase both sales and site visitors. No matter what the reason is, one of the most critical elements in attaining and maintaining a top slot on pages such as Google are backlinks.

The significance of backlinks cannot be underestimated and they are quite straightforward to understand. Backlinks are the links that appear on websites other than your own which point back to your website or web page. We have all seen these on the Internet, as they are particular words, phrases or internet addresses that are shown in blue and when you click on them, you are directed to another website. You will come across them on blogs, posts, forums, web pages, articles and various other forms of information that you will find online. This is quite simply what a backlink is. Google and other search engines will use the number of backlinks a particular web page has in order to rank it in Google search results. What this means is that a website that may, for example, have 600 backlinks will rank better for a specific keyword than a website that has only 20 backlinks. It is rather like a popularity rating. Google works hard to rank the popular sites more highly than the sites that are less popular.

The question that many ask is why such backlinks are so important in achieving high Google rankings for your website. The reason is because there is something else that Google takes into consideration also and this is something that many webmasters struggle with. You will probably be conscious that Google allocates all web pages a Page Rank (PR). If you install the Google toolbar, you will see the Page Rank of the website you are looking at the top of your computer screen. It is a small green bar that ranks sites from PR0 to PR10. If a website has very good content which is relevant to its keywords and website address, sooner or later Google will start to assign it a Page Rank and of course you will recall that the more backlinks you have, the better it is for you. However, this is not always the case and Page Rank is the reason for this. Backlinks from pages that have a high Page Rank will carry significantly more importance that those which come from pages with no Page Rank whatsoever. Therefore, one link from a PR5 page will count for so much more than numerous backlinks from PR0 sites.

It needs to be borne in mind that in order to achieve those high Google rankings, you must not only accumulate the amount of backlinks you have to your website, but you also need to focus upon getting them from websites that are relevant and have a good Page Rank. Google does not hand out Page Ranks that easily, so you should not be surprised if you are unable to find any pages to link from that have Page Ranks of no more than PR2 or PR3, as this is commonplace. How do you achieve high relevant backlinks? There are several methods to achieve this. Firstly, you can write and submit articles, such as the one you are reading at present, adding your website URL in the resource box. This makes a good start point, but of course there is no guarantee that your article will be published. Next, you can attempt to find websites that are similar to your own and then swap links, but once again, reciprocal linking does not carry as much weight as one way linking. Another method you can employ is to pay to have your link placed on a website that has a high Page Rank. This will have good results in terms of augmenting your ratings, as Google will look at such links from high Page Rank sites as being very strong. However, this can be expensive, so care should be taken.

If you requite assistance with your website, try to find an affordable website design agency, as they will not only be able to produce relatively cheap web design, but they will be able to offer advice and guidance on achieving backlinks for your site.