No matter what products or services your website offers, you need to get backlinks to drive your website up the search engine rankings. Backlinks are the life-blood of any SEO campaign and for all the cost and time you’ve dedicated to your website, it’s waste if it doesn’t rank well because you’ve overlooked a good backlinking strategy.

Why does your website need backlinks?

There are two primary factors that effect where your website appears in search results for your chosen keyphrase (i.e. ‘cheap laptops’, ‘family holidays uk’, ‘accountants in surrey’ etc):

• On-page optimisation – optimising your websites meta-tags, page content, internal links and titles for your chosen keyphrase.
• Off-page optimisation – creating an effective backlink campaign for your keyphrase to signify the importance of your website for that specific keyphrase.

To demonstrate the relevance of position in search results, the table below shows five examples of typical Google.co.uk searches for common keyphrases:

Tip: You can check how many backlinks a website has by using the Majestic Explorer Tool from our free tools page.

What this table clearly demonstrates is that the websites with more backlinks generally have a higher ranking in Google.co.uk. However, SEO is far more complex and it is not simply a case of the site with the most backlinks being top in every case.

There are numerous other factors that effect position such as the age of the domain name, on-page optimisation, etc, etc. However, with a little research you will soon see a clear pattern that sites that don’t have many backlinks RARELY ever obtain a good position in the search engines.

How to choose the best keywords for your links