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If you've found this article, you most likely fall into one of three groups:

If you've found this article, you most likely fall into one of three groups:

1) You have a website and wonder why you are getting no visitors

2) You have a website and have read somewhere about using backlinks to build traffic but you're not sure what that is or what to do about that

3) Other (this last group is to cover my butt!)

If you find that you are in one of the above categories (especially categories 1) and 2)), then you will definitely need this primer. Here I will explain what a backlink is and how it drives traffic, why you need to build them, and then a brief summary of tried and true tactics for building backlinks.

WHAT IS A BACKLINK?

A backlink is simply a link to your website. If someone out there in internet-land links to your website, that is a backlink.

HOW DOES A BACKLINK DRIVE TRAFFIC?

There are two main ways that links send traffic to your site: directly and through search engines

The first way is that anyone who sees your link may click on it to visit your site. That is what I mean by direct traffic.

The second and more important way is that the more backlinks you have, the higher you will rank in search engines. That is the simple version. There is a more complex explanation behind this when you get into the nitty gritty of it but we'll keep to the simple version for now.

Let's put examples behind these two methods: Let's say you have a website about dog training. In the first method: A user may go to a website where the author has put a link to your site. This user may click on that link and visit your website. In the second method: A user may type in the words "dog training" in a search engine like Google or Yahoo. The higher your page is listed, the more likely they will click on your link and visit your website

HOW DOES A SEARCH ENGINE USE BACKLINKS?

Way before search engine optimization was even its own acronym and when netscape and mosaic were the only browsers out there, websites were such a novel thing. The technology was new and exciting and when people found very cool sites they were quick to put a link to them for technology sake.

Then came the search engines which spidered and crawled all over the internet to index sites and pages. They would take notice of pages that got a lot of links to it. The algorithms continue to evolve and started giving different weights to properties of the link such as anchor text in the link, the value of the site that has the link, etc. to determine the site's position in the search engine results.

Then it also started paying attention to the "anchor text" of that link. For the longest time the most popular anchor text was "Click Here". Then people started including other words like using "Dog Training Manual" for the anchor text

Instead of using

*CLICK HERE* for a great Dog Training Manual

People now use

Click here for a great *DOG TRAINING MANUAL*

Search engines really made use of these contextual anchor texts used for the links so it could then give weight to the link knowing it was of a particular genre, such as "Dog Training" (or specifically "Dog Training Manual").

So the two things search engines consider when setting a value on a link: the anchor text used with the link, and the "quality" of the site providing the link. Search engine algorithms continue to change and add or delete different criteria when determining value. However these two main points are enough to get you going.

Now that you know what a backlink is and how backlinks are used to drive traffic to your site, you need to know how to build them. Keep an eye out for part two of this article series which will explain why you need to take it upon yourself to build your backlinks and how you should go about doing that task.