" Backlinks ," meaning sites that link to your site, are, for most search engines, the supreme ranking factor. So is getting more organic traffic. R elated: Don't Trust Your SEO Company Until You Can Verify Everything They Tell You Because that traffic is directly related to the quality of the backlinks your website has, the more authoritative websites that link to you, the better rankings and traffic you'll get. And of course you want to keep an eye on your Google rankings. When crawling the web, Google looks in particular for your website's backlinks, to understand how your pages are connected to one another and in what ways. Certainly there are hundreds of ranking factors. But backlinks represent the most important metric for SEO. Now, needless to say, quality backlinks are hard to get, but they shouldn't be. In fact there are smart ways to build or earn backlinks, to get authoritative websites to link to your online business. Here are ten: 1. The b