If you’re new to SEO, some of the terms you’ll likely hear are “backlinks”, “inbound links”, and “incoming links”. All of these mean the same thing, and they are a backbone of every successful SEO campaign.
Simply put, a backlink is a link that one website acquires from other websites. It is an important factor in determining how your pages rank in the search engine results page (SERP).
Here’s why SEO backlinks are crucial in building your website domain and page authority.
The Role of Backlinks in SEO
There are two ways search engines use links – to find new web pages and to decide the ranking of a page in their results.
Your backlink profile says a lot about how valuable your website is. They signify a “vote of confidence” in the quality of your content. If several websites link to your page or site, search engines can conclude that your content is relevant, credible and authoritative; hence, it’s worth appearing in the SERPs. The more quality backlinks you have, the better you’ll rank in Google, Bing and other search engines.
To give you a clear picture of how backlinks contribute to your SEO efforts, we take a closer look at their benefits:
Increase Organic Ranking
We’ve mentioned earlier that backlinks can improve your search engine rankings, but how do they exactly work?
One of the several traits that make up a quality backlink is that it comes from a trusted, authoritative website. The more authority the site has, the more authority it can pass to your site through a link. This will increase your domain authority and ultimately raise your organic search rankings.
Get Found Fast
Search engine bots discover new webpages in existing pages, which is why it will be more efficient for them to crawl and index your site when you have backlinks. This can give your rankings a boost in a short period.
Establish Your Authority
Receiving backlinks from leading sites in your industry implies that you are a reliable source of information. In turn, readers are more likely to recall and trust your brand. The right links will help you achieve a positive brand image and build meaningful relationships that will be beneficial in the long-term.
High vs Low-Quality Backlinks
Google utilises backlinks to assess your online reputation, ensuring that it provides users with the best possible result for their query. This is why link building is essential in SEO.
Not all backlinks are equal, however. Search engines take relevance and authority of the linking site into account to determine how your page will rank in the SERP. If you’re a home improvement contractor, for instance, a link from homeremodelismypassion.com won’t likely carry the value a link from houzz.com would have.
But how can you gauge backlink quality? Good backlinks come from relevant, trustworthy websites. Think of popular news sources, industry leaders and influencers. Meanwhile, bad backlinks come from unrelated and untrusted sources. This includes irrelevant directories and websites with poor or spammy content. Back then, companies exploited links from these types of sites to enhance their rankings, but search engines have eventually penalized them or removed them from the search results.
Simple Link Building Strategies
Getting links back to your site isn’t always as simple as publishing content and waiting for the links to show up, especially if you’re a new company and just starting on SEO. The good news is there are a few easy strategies you can use to start earning them:
Create high-quality content
Create a unique, interesting and informative content that your audience will naturally want to share and link to. Furthermore, you should promote your content to establish social proof. A quick way to spread the word is to share it on social media.
Make the most of your connections
You can also seek help from your friends, relatives, colleagues and partners who have a blog or website. Keep in mind, however, that relevance is significant. You’ll want links from websites that belong to the same niche as your site because they carry more weight than links from random sites.
Ask for reviews and mentions
Reach out to influencers with a large following. You’ll want to make sure that their audiences match your target demographic. You can collaborate with them for contests and ask users to mention your brand to join. Another way to generate links is to send them free products in exchange for reviews.
It can some time to naturally build your backlink profile, but with consistent effort, you’ll get great results. Steer clear of shortcuts like buying links and exploiting link farms as they are against Google’s guidelines. Any form of shady practice can ruin your SEO efforts and result in serious penalties, so don’t risk it.
DigitalMaas performs in-depth SEO backlink analysis on your website to remove toxic backlinks and look for link building opportunities to improve your brand authority and ultimately your search rankings. Contact us for more information. You may also sign up to our platform for your free site audit.
