Getting your company website listed on top of the coveted first fpage of a google search engine results page (serp) is, in part, sort of a popularity contest. Search Engine algorithms look at how many websites have created a link to your website. These are referred to as backlinks. For instance, if another site rates an article, or content on your website high enough to add a link to it, the search engines view this as a vote of confidence for your website. The more sites that link to your site, the higher it will likely rank on the seach engine results pages, or so the theory goes. In reality, backlinks are not all created equally. Some backlink are good and some are bad.  You should avoid bad backlinks.  Focus instead on creating good, quality backlinks. 

Bad Backlinking
Automatic link building software can produce backlinks between groups of sites, known as a link farm. These are considered bad links. Mainly, because these backlinks require a reciprocal link, this can result in confusion for the search algorithms. The algorithm is unable to calculate which page receives the main benefit of the link because it can't determine which site is being promoted. You want to avoid such a backlink.

Search engines give better ranking to webpages that receive many inbound links from high ranking authoritative sites. A site will be regarded as authoritative if it scores highly in relevant search engine rankings and the site contains content that is a good fit with the web content on the referred site.

Consistent keyword phrases will be relevant for search engine ranking. Search engine algorithms compare the keywords inside content on the referred websites. If both the recommending website along with the endorsed webpage contain related keywords, the backlinks are considered more influential.

The backlink hyperlink is assessed by the search engine crawlers, as well, to ascertain whether the anchor text is relevant to the recommended webpage. Inconsistent anchor text is likely to cause the web crawler to disregard the backlink.

You can build backlinks to your website by posting in forums that allow you to also include a link to your website in your signature. However, some forums use "no follow" tags to prevent spamdexing. If the forum uses this, your posts will not have an effect on your page rank.

Some SEOs have attempted to create backlinks through black hat techniques, such as creating spam blogs which exist for no other reason than to develop backlinks. These spam blogs can be easily identified as they generally contain poorly written content and tend to be crammed full of one-way links.

As search engine algorithms and web crawlers become more and more sophisticated it becomes trickier to game the machine. Fundamentally, website are more likely to rank highly if they contain valuable, unique content that is relevant to the keywords.

Focus on creating high quality content and building genuine networks. Post on relevant blogs and forums to obtain quality backlinks, which won't just create better search engine rankings but will drive interested visitors to your website.

I hope you find this backlinking information useful. If you want to acquire more information about the importance of generating lots of high top quality backlinks, contact your local SEO.

Good luck out there!