What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks occur when one website links to another website. Also referred to as inbound or inbound links, backlinks build their link through external websites. These links from external domains point to pages on your domain.
Whenever backlinks happen (especially quality backlinks), it’s like getting a “vote” for a web page. The votes you get from authority sites will have a more positive effect on the site’s SEO (ranking and search visibility).
To ensure attracting high-quality links that are not part of a link-building program, site owners should ensure that they follow Google Webmaster Guidelines on links.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are important to both search engines and end users. Search engines help determine how authoritative and relevant your site is to the keyword or topic you are ranking for. Also, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that other external websites recognize your content.
When multiple sites link to the same web page or website, search engines may interpret that content as worth linking to and therefore rank higher on the Google search results page.
For years, the number of backlinks was an indicator of a page’s popularity. But today, more attention is paid to quality.
These are important to the end user because they connect searchers to similar information written on the same topic in other sources.
How Do You Build Backlinks?
Now that you know that these are important, how do you get other links to your site? What’s the best strategy to get website links pointing to and from your site?
Link building is critical to the success of any SEO campaign.
Having thousands of backlinks or links from a single website will not affect your ranking position.
Although those strategies have worked in the past, they are outdated. Today’s backlink guidelines revolve around your content and overall authority on a topic, achieving:
- Guest bloggers create content for your site
- Original research with insights
- Building relationships with influencers
- Write quality blog posts for other sites in your field
- Connection recovery
There are many ways to manage and understand your backlink profile. Majestic, Buzz stream, and Moz offer tools to help you manage URLs and improve your link profile.
Conclusion
Getting unique and authoritative links is crucial to ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs) and improving your SEO overall.
Google’s algorithm for evaluating links has evolved in recent years to focus on quality links, not quantity. This has made it a very challenging process to get high-quality back links in your SEO strategy.
External links are still important and not obsolete, so start working on a link-building strategy to improve your search visibility.