If you looked at that headline and went “Huh?” – you’re probably brand new to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There is an entire business industry setup around helping web site owners, blog authors, and online publications optimize every page – make that every word of every page of content – highly optimized to be indexed by search engines like Google or Yahoo!.
Search engines each have their own algorithms for indexing and ranking pages – there are books, seminars and get-rich-quick schemes all surrounding the cult of Google Page Rank. Businesses seem to live and die by their Google PR. The better optimized your site, the higher your page rank will be. A page rank is what determines how high in the results your listing is when customers are searching on certain keywords.
If you want people to find you, you want to be earlier in the search results, right? If your competitors are in front of you, your potential client might go with them first, and that means lost sales or ad revenue. Google and other search engines want their search results to be the most relevant, so they check things like your site’s meta-data and description and match it to keywords.
Back-links are when a site with more credibility or popularity than you links to your site. If it has a higher page rank than yours, it helps your page rank grow. Search engines rate links from sites with .EDU addresses as more relevant, because only educational institutions are allowed to have them. Since school teachers and administrators and professors are likely to be more researched (or so they think), an edu link is worth a lot to growing your site’s relevance within search results.
Also, just a link on a .EDU site isn’t going to help. Search engines look at the content around a link, so a link on the side of a page not surrounded by content is going to be less relevant than a link surrounded by content in an article, for example.
