You've found the keywords you want to target and you've done search engine basics. It's time to start talking about the one thing that will help you get a first page ranking on Google. This one thing will do more for your search engine rankings than anything else. This one thing that really moves the meter is called a backlink.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is when a another website links to your website. Google looks more at your links to determine your ranking than all other factors combined. Google uses backlinks to determine your ranking more than anything else because they're one factor that determines your popularity and relevance that you have little control over.

In the early days of search engines site owners could simply keyword stuff their pages. That means they might put their keywords and phrase over and over on their website. Early search engines would crawl the site and see all these mentions of a specific keyword and phrase and assume the page is relevant. Then one day along came a company called Google and they introduced a new way of determining a site's relevance based on who and what linked to them. Each one of these links to your site is like a little vote except with backlinks not all links are created equal.

Google assigns a value to each site linking to you determined by a number of factors. The entirety of those factors is kept secret by Google but for the most part popular websites that receive a lot of traffic, been around a while, and have a lot of other sites linking to them pass more link juice than a new website, with little traffic, and few links.

For example_ If an article is written about your website on a major news site like CNN and that article links back to your website Google will look at that link as being far more important than a link you created from your Facebook page or Twitter account to your website. The more of these high quality links you get the more relevant your site is considered.

There are a number of things you can do to get as many of these powerful links to your website as possible. In the next session I will cover some of the things you can do to attract relevant, powerful links to your website. You haven't already done so you can create your very own free website at WebStarts.com.