Most ordinary Internet users have encountered a link. That blue thing that they see on blogs, Web sites, Facebook accounts, even on YouTube. Just about every page of the Web has it. And when these links point to your Web site, they are called your site’s backlinks.

Backlinks, or inbound links, are incoming links to a certain Web site or page that does not originate on that particular site. Put simply, it is a link from another site that points back to your own site. If you have a Web site, pray hard that you get a lot of backlinks, as they are the only way people will get to visit your site without you telling them personally that your site exists.

An even more important thing to consider when talking about backlinks is search engine optimization or SEO. Backlinks are one way to get a higher ranking on most search engines, provided that they occur naturally. Search engine spiders are now capable of counting the number of sites pointing to your own. And most search engines consider these backlinks in ranking your site according to a particular keyword.

If you are interested to see just how many Web sites or pages have backlinks pointing to your site, you can go to Google Search at Google.com and input link:www.yoursite.com. In just seconds, the search results would list the different Web sites or pages that do link to your site, and in the upper right hand portion of the screen, you’d see the total number of sites and pages that have backlinks to your site.