Even though SEO standards change constantly, backlinks have always played a key role in maximizing organic traffic and boosting you rankings in the SERPs. What is a backlink? It is simply a link from another website pointing to your website. Sounds easy enough but just putting a link from your friends blog to your site my not get you the tons of organic traffic that you may expect.

Value of a Backlink
Many search engines and especially Google rank the value of the backlink from the website so authority sites such as Wikipedia will have more value than that of your buddy’s website on Blogger.

Relevancy also plays a key role so if you have a medical website, a link from Web MD would prove to be extremely relevant and would in turn result in a better backlink for your site.

Power of .edu Sites
In my experience, getting a backlink from an .edu site can be very beneficial and have a high value for a backlink. If you can find one that has a guestbook or forum that allows for HTML, putting a link to your site wouldbe an easy way to get a decent backlink.

Nofollow Sites, Don’t Waste Your Time
Before you go out and start spamming comments on wordpress blogs and other forums, please note that many sites implement a “nofollow” attribute to most of their outbound links as a way to prevent people from misbehaving and posting irrelevant links to Viagra sites and such.

As a default, Wordpress automatically assigns the nofollow attribute to links submitted into comments. Other popular sites that implement nofollow tags are Youtube, Digg, Furl, Propeller, and Technorati Favs.

Find Your Own Backlinks
If you go to Google and in the search box type in “link:mywebsite.com” Google will show you all the sites that link to your own.