This is a question I get asked a lot these days, and so I want to clear up some misconceptions regarding backlinks, and using them to get more customers to your website. First, let's get clear on what backlinks are.
If you want to get more customers to visit your website, you need great content, but you also need some powerful backlinks. Content is pretty obvious - material that's worth reading, material that shows off your expertise or your relevance, and that keeps people wanting to come back for more. If you have content, then you are worth "sharing", and sites or businesses that are shared more often are viewed as being particularly relevant to a given search term or key word phrase.
Theoretically, backlinks show the webpages to which they link back to as being relevant and credible by the very fact that they're worth linking to. They're generally how you shared a website (and still do to some extent). Google's original search algorithm relied very heavily on the presence of backlinks to "organically" determine the value of a webpage (the "PageRank", named not for the term "web page" but for Larry Page, one of Google's two founders). The thinking being that the more back links you have, the more you're being shared and the more relevant you are. As we'll see in a moment, this thinking left open a few very exploitable loopholes. And exploited they were. That said...
Backlinks alone will not make your website great.
In just the last year or so they've gone from being the most important thing to getting your page seen (as the source of how search engines determined if you were "relevant" or not), to only one of a few dozen.
Backlinks will appear in one of two ways: either as clickable hyperlinks linking back to your website either as a stand-alone link (e.g. http://www.wikipedia.com ), or as a link "anchored" to a word or phrase, which is intended to associate a particular page with those keywords, bumping up the pages relevancy for such terms (e.g., Aristotle ).
Part of what drove down the importance of backlinks was the cottage industry which sprung up around creating "fake" backlinks. Using automated programs (or a large group of dedicated folks), people figured out that they could artificially "bump up" the rankings of a web page and it's association with certain terms. This gave rise to the "Google bombing" that ultimately lead to the Google-ing of the phrase "miserable failure" leading to the White Houses biography of George W. Bush!), as thousands of people joined in creating anchored hyperlinks to associate politicians and other famous individuals and organizations with terms that were at least ironic if not outright disgusting.
Then, a certain department store chain got called out by no less than the New York Times for picking up on this, and using it to their advantage. Google panicked, and began to look for ways to rely less heavily on backlinks.
Social Media and Page Rank
Facebook is the largest thing on the internet - with about 1 in 7 people in the world having an account at this point (roughly, though some are fakes or duplicates, to be sure).
Shares, likes, Twitter tweets and more are all becoming important ranking factors, in part because they all represent genuine backlinking. It's much, much harder to get fake, pointless content to go viral with real people, so when something get's thousands of likes on Facebook (or +'s on Google's social network, Google+). Social media represents, overall, what real people are thinking or how they're feeling about whatever the relevant noun would be (the person, place, thing, or idea in question). Social sharing is the new backlinking.
Relevant Backlink Rules
That said, the traditional form of backlinks can still be valuable, but Google has continually revised how it appreciates them, looking at not only how many there are but who put them there, where they are, how quickly they occurred, etc.
Backlinks need to be from sites which themselves have a high page rank. Subsequently, the
page rank of those sites needs to be "organic", driven by their content.
Sites that are respected for being business sites, or business listing sites, like Yellowpages.com, Yelp.com, and of course Google's own Google+ Local, are going to be the best bets for "organic" and worth-while backlinks.
Thus, rather than focus on artificially creating backlinks, focus on creating good content and a good community, and the backlinks will take care of themselves!
Justin has been working as a consultant, helping small and medium sized companies dominate their local market by getting on the first page of Google + Local's business search listings, and through reputation marketing. He has a unique, 5 minute video at http://www.HundredsOfCustomers.com which outlines the drastic changes that have occurred in the world of internet marketing! He's helping dozens of companies get hundreds of new customers every month.
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