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But do we really need them?

Last Monday a local business contacted me and asked for an appointment so that we could discuss the future of their website. It had been online since 2000 and had been left in the hands of a small web development company that had originally put it together.

Sadly, since 2000 the people who have been running the site for the business have done very little with it and, even though it could be a very important way to bring clients to this business, it has been allowed to languish.

In what little spare time Steve had he put together a snapshot of the site so that we could give the owners some idea of what their site was doing and what would be needed to work it up to the point where it would be generating sales for the business.

Using a few simple tools and Firefox extensions we were able to get a very clear picture of the site and it wasn't a very nice picture at all. Unlike some businesses this one could certainly use a functioning website that would rank highly in the search engines for a number of different terms. They are involved in an industry where lots of people from all around the world search for their product and their competitors certainly have the edge on them.

One of the most dismal numbers we saw was the number of back links their site has.

The Importance of Back Links
Back links are important because that is one of the major factors by which Google and the other search engines judge the importance and worth of your site. Basically, as far as the search engines are concerned if you don't have many back links then your site is not one that could be considered as being important.

And back links don't just happen; you have to work at getting them and it really is a process that should never end. Some back links will come naturally depending on the quality of the content in your site but for the most part you have to work very hard to get them.

Spammers know the importance of back links - that's why they're out there day after day spamming the crap out of blog comments and message boards. Unfortunately many other webmasters and site owners do not understand how important back links are. That's one of the reasons why the site we were looking at had very few back links - no one had bothered to work at getting them.

How to Find Your Back Link Number Finding the number of back links the major search engines see for your sites is relatively easy even if you don't have any of the neat Firefox extensions. However, not all the numbers you will see will have much to do with reality.

Google's back link numbers are woefully inaccurate and it's quite possible that they will actually show that you have no back links at all. However, don't be too alarmed because what Google shows you and what it knows your back links to be are two very different numbers.

To check your Google back links all you have to do is type link:www.mysite.com into the search field on Google and hopefully Google will show you at least a few sites that do link to you. When Steve hit Google with that link for the site belonging to the local business we found that Google claimed to have no back links listed for the site at all.

Sadly in this case that zero return was probably quite close to reality - and remember, this is a site that has been around for six years!

MSN will also show you some back links but whereas Google is very miserly with it's back link figure MSN seems to be the exact opposite. In MSN the site Steve was researching returned an amazing number of back links - about seven pages of them and it will undoubtedly do the same for you too.

The command to use for MSN is link:www.mydomain.com but don't take that number as being all that relevant. It's definitely inflated (dare I say delusional) but the most important links do seem to be returned at the top of the list and that's worth seeing.

And finally there is Yahoo and that is the number you need to pay attention to. It was certainly the sad number for the site Steve was investigating because all it returned for the site that's six years old was seven back links.

So that is the relevant figure that we have to work with if this local business turns into a client. There are also a lot of other issues that need attention with that site but the number of back links have definitely got to be increased if that site is to ever go anywhere in the major search engines.

So what's your true back link number and how much work have you got to do to get it up to a point where the search engines will begin to view your site as being one worth listing on the first few search engine result pages?