Backlinks occur when one website links to another website.
Also referred to as incoming or inbound links, backlinks make their connection through external websites. These links from outside domains point to pages on your own domain.
Whenever backlinks occur (particularly quality backlinks), it is like receiving "a vote" for a webpage. The more votes you get from sites with authority, the more positive an effect on a site’s SEO (rankings and search visibility).
Tip: Follow links pass link equity, while NoFollow links do not.
Site owners need to make sure they follow Google Webmaster Guidelines on links to ensure they attract high quality links that are not part of a link building scheme.
Backlinks are important for both search engines and end users.
Backlinks help search engines determine how authoritative and relevant your site is on the keyword or topic for which you rank. Furthermore, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that other external websites are endorsing your content.
If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can interpret that that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth ranking higher on the Google search results page.
For many years, the quantity of backlinks was an indicator of a page’s popularity. But today, the focus is more on the quality of the backlinks.
In addition, it's been quoted that Google uses more than 200 different ranking factors to evaluate where a web page might appear in the search results.
Backlinks are also important for the end user because backlinks connect searchers with information that is similar to what is being written on the same topic on other resources.
An example of this happens when an end user is reading a page that discusses “how child care expenses are driving women out of the workforce.”
As they scroll down, they might see a website link with a study on “how the rise in child care costs over the last 25 years affected women’s employment.” In this case, a backlink establishes connection points for information that a searcher may be interested in clicking.
The link appears as a hyperlink with descriptive text known as anchor text. This appears differently than the surrounding text, indicating that there is more information beyond what appears on the page if the searcher chooses to follow the website link.
This external link creates a solid experience because it transfers the user directly to additionally desirable information if needed.
Now that you know that backlinks 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 when it comes to ranking organically.
Simply having thousands of backlinks or only having links from one website isn’t going to affect your rank position.
Despite having worked in the past, those strategies are outdated. Today's backlink guidelines revolve around your content and overall authority on a topic, which can be achieved by:
There are also many ways to manage and understand your backlink profile. Majestic, Buzzstream, and Moz offer tools to help you manage URLs and optimize your link profile.
seoClarity offers an integration with Majestic, the largest link index database, that integrates link profile management into your entire SEO and digital marketing strategy.
More backlink resources:
Getting unique and authoritative links is crucial for higher ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and improving your SEO altogether.
Google's algorithm on the evaluation of links evolved in recent years which focused on quality links, not quantity. This created a more challenging process to gain high quality backlinks within your SEO strategy.
External links still matter and aren’t obsolete, so start working on a link building strategy to improve your search visibility.