Backlinks are incoming links and are an essential part of anyone’s SEO strategy. So lets start at the very beginning. Backlinks are links from one website to another, these are counted by the search engines as similar to a “vote” for the “linked to” website. If a website is getting a vote from a website then it must be good, right!
No not always, but that is the way search engines are set up to work, and it does make up a big chunk of a websites popularity, or ranking in the search engines.

Desirable

Backlinks could be made via a navigation button or an image backlink, but by far the best and most desirable is a textual backlink, this allows the search engines to sort the links popularity. If a website has lots of links and the majority of those links have the text, for example “London Olympics 2012″ then you would expect to be taken to a site that has something to do with the London Olympics in 2012.

Not Foolproof!

It is not foolproof and I use that example because I did search for that exact phrase during the 2012 Olympics, and some people must have been building links with that text for a long time, and some of the ranked sites had nothing to do with the Olympics at all, they knew the search would be one of the most popular of the year and decided to “hijack” the search term. No doubt someone is probably already working on the phrase “Brazil Olympics 2016″.
Hopefully, by the time Brazil get to host the games Google will have sorted that little problem out.

Quality Counts

Quality backlinks are better than lesser quality backlinks, which makes sense, for instance a webpage with a PageRank of 9 linking to a site carries more authority than a site with a PageRank of 8,7,6 5 etc.
Also links from trusted sites such as an education or a government website, with the domain name .EDU or .GOV are highly sought after as these are only granted to those establishments, anyone can buy a dot.com but not everyone can buy a .EDU or .GOV domain name.
I have read varying reports where it has been claimed that these sites links are worth ten, or even an hundred times more than a normal link, only the search engine know exactly, but for sure you want some of these in your collection.
Having links from sites in your own niche also carries more weight.

There are some software tools which will create backlinks, but these are risky, and can lead to penalties from Google and in the worst case scenario can end up with your site being de-indexed.

At Boost Your Website we create backlinks naturally to avoid any present or future problems with any Google updates.