Backlinks are just how they sound – links that lead back to your site. They’re like fingers all over the Internet and each finger is pointing the way for people to find your domain. If you have a website and you write an article with a link back to your site and you submit it to an article directory, that link is considered a backlink. You might see backlinks referred to as inbound links as well.

What’s the purpose of backlinking? What backlinks have the ability to do is raise your search engine ranking, which is what every marketer wants because the more visible your site, the more traffic, the better the odds are of making money.

The links work sort of like a popularity contest. They show the search engine spiders and search bots that your website is popular. Sites with a lot of relevant backlinks will be looked on favorably by search engines.

You can garner backlinks through natural methods. This means your pages are so good, so helpful with information, that others create links on their sites to point to your pages. You can also ask websites to backlink to yours and offer a link to their site, which is known as reciprocal linking.

Some blogs will let you leave comments and you can leave a backlink to your site. Not all blogs allow this. In forums, you can do the same by having a link in your signature file.

Look for popular forums in your niche and become an active community member. You can also use backlinks in videos and on social sites or on product reviews that you do about your niche.

Getting backlinks for your website is vital to the monetary health of your business, yet it can take a tremendous amount of time to set up backlinks – time that pulls you away from working on creating products to sell or concentrating on affiliate marketing.

That’s why some marketers choose to pay other people to create their backlinks for them.  You want to make sure that whoever you hire understands how backlinks work.  You can do this by hiring a writer to create articles and turn them into the various article directories or you can hire a service that specializes in site promotion.

Backlinks should be grown slowly whether you outsource it to a professional or take the do it yourself route. You never want to show search engines hundreds or thousands of new links in a day. Pace yourself for healthy link boosts and the search engines will see that as a positive sign that your site is an authority.