I know that they're good, but what is it: PR increasing, ranks better in serps...? What specifically is good about having a lot of backward links to your site? (I used the google toolbar to find them and the number)
Quite simply, any link into a website is a “vote of confidence†for the site and looked favourably upon by search engines, this “vote of confidence†is subject to gearing of the referrers website and as a result the higher the page rank the better the inbound link quality. Further factors affect the quality of these inbound links such as the relevance of the site to your site, the more relevance the better the link quality and so on. The algorithm used in calculating the Google PageRank for a site takes these inbound links into account. When looking at improving organic listings for your site, back-links need to be considered Hope this helps
The more links you have, the better your search engine rankings can be. Of course it is not just about link quantity. Google in particular cares more about link quality....things like relevancy, pagerank, number of outbound links, domain age, link age, etc. Also your links should have your target keywords in the link anchor text.
The links pointing towards my page, not on it, correct? Like an ezine article hyperlink should have anchor text of a keyword I'm shooting for and lead back to my site?
That's right - links pointing TO your page from other sites help you. Be wary of links pointing out from your site - especially from the home page. This could decrease your pr by draining hte "link juice" you've gained. Yes definitely use anchor text with keywords in it but remember to vary the anchor text to make it look "natural" - therefore, if targetting "website design suffolk" make sure you have "web design suffolk", "suffolk website design", "afforable web design suffolk", "website design and seo suffolk", "website deign" etc not to mention a few simple url links and - I have been told - the odd "my site" link just so it doesn't look too spammy. Opinions are divided as to whether Google will penalise you if you have all the links the same or whether it will just ignore too many "same" links - I have now tried to vary my anchor text to play safe. Depending on what your competition is like, you may well find that backlinks are the BIGGEST factor in SEO - I can get sites to the top of Google if the competition hasn't bothered about backlinks; if I'm competing with high pr sites then I need high pr to get a lookin. Hope this helps.