Backlinks Are Still The Major Website Traffic Stream

Let's start with this experiment.  Go to Google, Yahoo or MSN and type "get it here" in the search box. Note the results on the first result pages and try to deduce why the results came out what they are!

Being on the first page of results on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN for certain keywords is the purpose of every search engine optimization project. Being at the first page, will bring free organic traffic and of course more business and value to the website.  When optimizing for search engines, most optimizers concentrate on optimizing the website itself by enhancing titles, keywords, descriptions, image alts, page text and other factors that with no doubt are very important for any search engine optimization project. However, I noticed that webmasters get lazy when it comes to the most important factor that brings websites to the top of the search engine results.

At the time of writing this article, both Google and Yahoo returned quicktime.com in the first position for the "get it here" keyword. MSN returned the Adobe flash player page. The least amount of results was 354,000,000 search results.

When you go to either the adobe flash player page or the quick time player page and take notes from a search engine optimization prospective; "get it here" is not in the domain name, not in the title of the page, not in the keywords, not in the meta description, not in any alt of the images nor anywhere else in the pages text or html source code! Further, you can bet that you will get the same notes if you looked at all the web pages on the first result pages of Google, Yahoo or MSN.  The question is: how did these pages get to rank high in search engines in such a way in spite the fact that they are irrelevant and not optimized for that specific keyword?

The domain name, title, meta description, keywords, image alts and page text are all important seo factors but they are obviously not the answer. The major search engine optimization factor is backlinks.

Optimizing your website's elements such as the keywords and your page texts is just the beginning. Those elements are important but they should only be considered as a preparation phase. The real work starts right after finishing this phase.

Adobe flash player and quick time is used by millions of users. You probably have encountered something similar to this sentence "This page requires flash player. If you do not have flash player installed get it here". The "get it here" is a backlink to the flash player page. Millions of websites have a link to the Adobe flash player page with "get it here" for the text of the link and with no doubts that's why adobe flash player is number one for the "get it here" keyword.

An important thing to notice here is that the benefit of having backlinks to a site is not only by bringing the website to the top of search engine results. A backlink also brings even more website traffic from clicks on that link. If you have paid for a pay per click marketing campaign, then you know how much a click is worth! Millions of users click the "get it here" link and go to the Adobe and QuickTime website at no cost to either! You do the math!

Backlinks are with no doubt your primary source of website traffic. Backlinks bring you to the top of search engine results. Backlinks establishes your website popularity. Traffic to your website is the value of your website, backlinks are what creates traffic and therefore, building backlinks should be on the top of your marketing campaign priorities to maximize the traffic and value of your website.

Backlinks are simply the links that you get to your website from other websites. If you do not have sufficient amount of links pointing to your website, you will keep striving and paying money to get a small portion of traffic that probably will not cover your expenses nor will it be worth the time you spend using other search engine optimization methods such as optimizing your website content. Even if you have the best website with the best content, if you do not have backlinks, you will not have any significant website traffic.