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The world of SEO is primarily governed by page rank. Incoming links to a website, also known as backlinking, plays a very important role in it. In fact, the page rank is highly dependent on the quantity and quality of backlinks.

Before getting into the importance and other details, you must know what backlinking is. Backlinks are basically the links that direct towards your website. The quality of backlinks i.e. the sites that contain your link add a lot of volume to the online presence of your website. More than 90% of the SEO efforts these days are focussed on quality of the links only.

Importance
The importance of backlinking can be explained through following reasons:

•    The quality of your backlinks attracts the search engines to find your site easily. If an already popular site contains the inbound link to your site, it’s easy for the search engines to trace you and rank you.
•    The ranking algorithm used by search engines uses backlinking as a criterion. If two sites are similar in the kind of content and styling, the ranking decision is made on the number of quality inbound links a particular site has.
•    Link popularity and the link anchor text are also very important deciding factors for ranking a site by all the major search engines like Yahoo and Google. Anchor text is actually the labelling of the hyperlink and the bots or the spiders examine this text to determine its relevance with respect to the content on the page.
•    Backlinks actually act as direction pointers to attract visitors. There are millions of sites on the internet and to gain the attention of a visitor, you need to keep pointers at the most frequented places, in this case, most frequented websites.

The quality of backlinking directly impacts the web traffic and the web presence of your site. So it requires you to put in a good amount of effort in this area to improve your rankings.