In search engine optimization, website backlinks continue to play an important role in determining the visibility and ranking of websites on search engines like Google and Bing. For marketers and SEO professionals, quality backlinks help push their websites or web pages to the top of search results, considering all the intricacies. In this blog post, we will discuss backlinks and their importance in search engine ranking.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are links from one website to a page on another website. Pages with a higher number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings. A high-quality backlink to your site is also a signal to search engines that others like and recommend your content.
Do I need a lot of experience to build backlinks?
You might think that to check website backlinks, you would need a lot of experience, but that is not completely true; you need to be inquisitive, think innovatively, and correlate input, process, and outcome. This framework, however lengthy, can fetch more quality results.
Why are backlinks important?
Referral Traffic
Backlinks from high-traffic websites can invite more referral traffic, providing more visitors who are actively engaged. Active user engagement is a key metric for a website’s performance.
Improving Brand Authority
Backlinks from reputable websites and high-traffic websites work well for your SEO and also enhance your brand authority. This method can improve customer trust and improve business performance.
Competitive Advantage
Websites with strong backlink profiles generally outperform competitors in search results, inviting more organic footfall and more business opportunities.
For Ranking purpose
Since the late 1990s, backlinks have been an integral part of Google’s algorithm. As per Backlinko, pages that ranked in the top Google search results have 3.8 times more backlinks than those below them. This stat highlights the direct correlation between backlinks and webpage rankings. Backlinks from trusted sources can also signal the search engines that your website is trustworthy and reliable.
Long term Gain
Once you have established credibility with content and other standard SEO practices, quality backlinks can continue to drive traffic and enhance SEO for many years, providing long-term benefits without additional effort.
Quality over quantity
In the early 2000s, numerous websites were climbing the SEO ladder through sheer backlinks in greater quantity, but quality was not of much importance in those days.
Fast forward to today; the quality of backlinks is far more critical for a successful SEO. Search engines now prioritize much on links from high authority and relevant websites. A single backlink from a highly reputed website is more powerful than numerous links from lesser-known sources.
For instance, a backlink from a leading industry publication like a search engine journal carries more weight than multiple links from non-relevant websites. It is important to remember that backlinks should be from industry-specific websites, as they help to establish more brand authority.
How do you build quality backlinks?
Content Creation
Creating and publishing high-quality, compelling, and actionable content is the foremost driver of backlinks. By creating valuable resources such as white papers, detailed guides, and informative articles, you can invite other websites to link to your content.
Guest Blogging
Writing articles for other relevant blogs can be a great way to gain backlinks. However, you should focus on blogs that hold a high domain authority to ensure you invite quality links.
Public Relations
Engaging with media platforms and getting featured in news articles and industry-specific press releases can invite more valuable backlinks from credible sources.
Backlink Analysis
For a successful backlink analysis, marketers use tools like Aherfs, Semrush, Uber Suggest, etc, to identify where their competitors are getting their backlinks from. Insights fetched from these tools also allow you to target similar or better sources (websites/blogs) and secure backlinks from them as well.
Wish to learn more about SEO? Don’t miss out on our recent article discussing the top benefits of SEO.
Conclusion
Backlinks have been and will remain an integral part of implementing a successful SEO strategy.
Marketers and SEO enthusiasts should strive to understand and implement strategies for obtaining high-quality backlinks. This approach, when carefully implemented, can significantly impact their website’s search engine visibility and yield a good return on efforts and time invested.
