There is no sense having a website if you don’t have traffic to your site. The primary goal of commercial websites is to provide valuable information to visitors that will eventually lead to an increase in business. But if there is no traffic to the website, having one is pointless. Having lots of backlinks is one of the best ways to increase traffic to a website.
A backlink is when there is a link on someone elses website to yours. Backlinks increase your traffic in two ways:
1. People visiting other peoples websites can click through and visit your site.
2. Search engines count and rate the links pointing to your site and give ranking preference to the sites with the better backlinks. This makes your site more likely to be found by the search engines.
Not all backlinks are equal. While we don’t know how the different search engines rate backlinks, we know the things that they are likely to give authority to. Here are a few:
1. relativity – backlinks from pages relative to your web page are better than links from non-relative sites.
2. pagerank (PR)- backlinks from sites with high page rank, that is, websites that the search engines already see as quality sites, is better than from low ranking sites. Page Ranks are from 0 to 10. Google is a 10. most sites are zero’s.
3. sponsored TLD’s – backlinks from sponsored Top Level Domains (TLD’s) like .edu and .gov probably carry more authority than backlinks from same ranking .com’s.
4. Anchor Text – Anchor text refers to the words on the page that make up the link. Anchor text with keywords in it is better than non-relative anchor text.
So an attorney with a backlink from the front page of harvard.edu (PR 
using the word “attorney” for the anchor text to their site would have one heck of a backlink. It would be far better to have that one single backlink than a hundred irrelevant zero PR .com backlinks.
There is plenty of debate over whether or not search engines give credit for no-follow links. No-follow links have code behind the scenes that tells the search engines to not follow the link… such as for indexing purposes. Chances are the search engines give some credit for no-follow links. Afterall, it is clear that they keep count of them. But search engines don’t reveal their algorythems because knowing them would help professional search engine experts promote pages that might not deserve a high ranking.
