Copy paste from wikipedia (http: // en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink)

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Backlinks (or back-links [UK]) are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

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You can create a web page with review to a specific product, and put your 'affiliate link' on the page. By creating thaousands of backlinks into your web page, your SERP (Search Engine Result Position) will increase thus also give your free 'targeted traffic' to your web page.

Article marketing is one way of creating many backlinks to your webpage, by putting a hyperlink inside your articles.

Hope these answer your questions

With article marketing, you put your URL in the bio section of your article, or at the bottom od the article. When another site picks up your article from an article directory, you get a link back to your site (they are requred to give you credit and must leave your URL link in the article). There are many ways to get backlinks but some work better than others. Hope this helps. Good luck

Backlinking is when you have links coming back to your site. Few more reasons why.

Search engines have spiders which search the internet to 'index' sites based on their content. This is so that when people search for a particular topic the search engines can give them the most appropriate content. The way these spiders go from one site to another is through links within sites.. think of these as pathways.

Now if your site is linked to hundreds of sites in your niche, the search engines will keep getting directed to you and they will naturally think... hey this must be a special site.. a site of authority.. so lets give this site a lot of priority when it comes to its ranking in our search engine.

So the aim is to increase your search engine popularity and to do this a popular and effective technique is to put links on many good sites which link back to yours. aka a backlink.

If you search this forum you will notice that people have links in their signature.. this will go back to their website/article/blog or whatever. You can see this in my signature too. What this does is put some good backlinks from warrior forum (a great site) to my site. And because warrior forum is an internet marketing forum, and i'm in the IM niche, then thats super good.

You can put backlinks in articles (authors bio), forums, squidoo pages, hubpages, commenting on blogs and track-backs when you make a blog post about another blog.

The more quality backlinks you have the better.

And the more backlinks.. the more traffic.. the more sales. Thats a shortened way to describe how its good for affiliate marketing.

But make sure your back links describe your site. ie for me i'd rather have Internet Marketing Resource than just www.williambak....com. This is so that the search engines can actually put your site in context.. making in even better for seo -> The search engines care about what your about, not who you are.

Start with putting a link in your signature on this forum...

Ok.. i hope this helps! I'm half asleep here so if its a bit wonky my apologies

Cheers
Will

So, every time I publish an article and include my URL in my resource box, I'm creating a "backlink?" LOL. Why, in that case, I'm an expert at backlinking!

URL - if you have your own dot com ex. w w w.exampleonly . com
leave it to famous sites or pages if possible. ex. ezinearticles.com
If your URL is kept by a lot of popular sites google evaluates you as popular too. So this will prioritize your page when people search the web (for a certain keyword).

Just to clarify, the URL is the web address of your website (i.e. Example Web Page). You should try for lots of quality back links (also known as one way links) pointing back to your web site URL. Also any web site the places your URL on their website is effectivevly creating a backlink to your site.

You need backlinks to move up the search engines for keywords, but you have to have the keyword in the link. If you want to rank well for "thegoddessofeleven", then you need to get links that have the anchor text "thegoddessofeleven". Some terms are harder to get good rankings for because they are being optimized by a lot of people.