The links from other websites to your website are called backlinks. These are placed on other websites and when clicked, your website is open. Backlinks help to get ranking in search engines because these are considered a ranking signal.

The number of quality pages that link to a particular page is a signal that a page may be a trusted source of information on a topic.

Source, Google’s Blog: How Google Delivers Reliable Informations in Search

These links create a reputation over the internet for your website. A good reputation helps to get ranked over search engines. That’s why it is necessary for search engine optimization.

Getting Backlinks is Off-Page optimization activity. Getting backlinks from trusted and relevant sites is most important to get the advantage of those links. When you are given links, they will be treated as outbound links for you and when you give links to others, they will be called inbound links for you.

Process of getting backlinks

There are some activities that help you get backlinks.

Write for People

When you start writing for people they can let you place a link in the article that you have written for them. This practice is called guest post or guest blogging.

You can send emails to webmasters of websites, where you are willing to contribute to the content.

Write a sharable content

When you write content with details and expertise, people use that content as a reference. Such references create unmatchable ranking signals. Your content gets a higher ranking not only because of the quality of content but the reference too.

The unrecommended and discouraged practice of building backlinks

Never ever do this for getting backlinks:

• Buying links from link farming website
• Directory, articles submissions
• Posting plagiarized content on various external third-party, free hosting blog sites
• Involving in links schemes, reciprocal linking etc
• Spam comments on blogs
• Forum participation with an intention to create links

How to make backlinks?

If you are writing an article and placing your link in that, use the text to create a hyperlink. If you are using an image instead of text, then you should mention the alt tag with the image.

Ensure that all pages on the site can be reached by a link from another findable page. Make sure the referring link includes either text or, for images, an alt attribute, that is relevant to the target page. Crawlable links are <a> tags with an href attribute.

Source – Advanced Webmaster Guidelins

Is the backlink really considered?

I am mentioning a statement from Google’s official blog.

If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing:

– Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority – Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks

Source: Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank

Some questions from the above statement:

• If links are not a ranking factor then why is there a penalty for buying selling links?
• Why do buying and selling links manipulate the search engine ranking?

I hope this article has cleared all your doubts and has enough details to make you learn about the backlink concept. If you find any detail or point missing, please let me know in the comment section.