If you are involved in internet marketing, backlinks is an an often discussed topic. If you are new to internet marketing, however, you may not fully grasp what they are and how you get them.

Organic traffic is traffic that you get to your website through searches in the search engines, like Google. The higher you rank in the search engines, the more organic traffic you will get. But, being on page 1 is not enough usually, as the number 1 spot gets the majority of the clicks and each successive spot down the first page get less and less traffic.

In brief, a backlink is a hyperlink (a link that can be clicked on) on a site somewhere else on the web that links back to your website. In its simplest crudest form, that is a backlink.

The three major search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo and Bing do not rely on backlinks as much when ranking websites, but since Google encompasses the vast majority of search engine traffic, Google is where all the action should be at.

Google will consider the so-called anchor text in the link (the word or phrase that is linked) and the authority of the site that the link is coming from to determine how highly or lowly your site should rank. And when it comes to Google organic search engine results, backlinks are pretty much all you have to influence the ranking success of your site.

Getting backlinks does not have to be rocket science. While it is true that awhile ago the preferred method was simply to ask webmasters for links, in today’s market, that is just not a viable option for most websites.

If you want serious numbers of backlinks, unfortunately, simply asking webmasters for links just wont’ cut it. If you want to rank for keywords these days, you need much more volume than you can accomplish using those strategies. Instead, you need something that works to help you get hundreds and thousands of backlinks to your site so you can rank for the kinds of keywords that you want to rank for.

Other things to watch out for with respect to backlinks include whether or note the link has a nofollow tag (which would make the link basically worthless for Google ranking), whether the site’s robot.txt file prohibits the Googlebot from crawling or indexing that page, what the Pagerank of the page and and Pagerank of the domain is, and many other factors.

If you want to learn how to get the most out of your backlink building, make sure to check out the backlinks forum for key strategies and tactics for link building.