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Importance of backlinks
A backlink is a link connecting one website to another. It is also called as ‘inbound link’. Link building is a crucial SEO element that helps to build domain and page authorities that contribute to the ranking on SERPs.
In reality, the importance of backlinks is more than these benefits.
- It boosts Google rankings
- Brings direct traffic
- Gives bragging rights
- Naturally attracts more backlinks
- Allows returning of favors
- Establishes brand awareness
Backlinks are also created just by chance – When a visitor visits your site and find the contents to be useful, they share it with their friends. This is a great thing to happen but it occurs rarely, but is not sufficient to make a considerable impact on your Google rankings. Therefore, you need to persuade influencers, bloggers, experts, and news platforms to allow backlinks to your website.
What is the relationship between Google algorithms and backlinks?
Backlinks show page authority
Google algorithm is becoming more complex as days pass. Today the backlink significance for rankings has gone down a little, but they contribute to your website strength and authority. Page and domain authorities are crucial indicators for Google to measure how influential your site is. The more authoritative your site is, the higher you will be ranked for targeted keywords. Backlinks offer a direct path for visitors to locate your website.
Backlinks signify a vote of confidence
Backlinks are crucial for SEO as they signify a vote of confidence. Each vote tells that the content is useful, credible, and valuable. Therefore backlinks are the most critical feature of outstanding SEO ratings. It helps Google see visitors from other authoritative sites vouching for your content and so they rank your pages high in SERPs. Backlinks are great for search visibility as well as rankings.
A backlink is a similar version of Google’s original algorithm called PageRank, nothing new. Google has confirmed that backlink will remain among the top three most crucial ranking factors. As all the backlinks are not created equally, you need to focus on the ones that will rank high. Just a single high-quality backlink is stronger than a thousand low-quality ones.
Traits of high-quality backlinks that Google rewards
- The ones that come from authoritative and trusted websites. [The domain authority is passed to your site through the link]
- The links include the target keyword in anchor text.
- The site linking back belongs to or is relevant to your niche.
- The link is the ‘Dofollow’ link. [Nofollow tags are not as valuable for Google rankings but can draw targeted traffic]
Quality of backlinks is based on relevancy, authoritativeness, and credibility, so ensure to build a solid link-building process to gain exposure, visibility, and top ranking on searches.
Earning backlinks
Backlinks you earn from high DA and established websites are worth earning as they carry more value.
The backlinks from low-authority websites are useless.
You can earn backlinks in three ways:
- Naturally – The only effort is to create innovative and interesting content regularly to earn organic links.
- Manually – Backlink strategy includes writing posts and publishing on other relevant sites or blogs as a guest. Make sure to embed a link pointing to your website within the guest-post body.
- Self-created – A backlink is generated, when the site owner manually interacts in blog comments, forums, or online directories. Be careful, when you self-create links because irrelevant ones are not appreciated by search engines. Add Nofollow tag to them, so that Google does not penalize your website. Fortunately, visitors can locate your site, and hence they are still valuable.
Why build backlinks?
Digital marketing professionals and internet marketers use link building as a part of their SEO strategy.
There are multiple reasons to build backlinks.
- Generates high traffic – Backlinks help to drive more traffic towards your website through extended visibility and popularity on search engines. For gaining benefits from link building strategy, you need to publish high-quality content relevant to your niche on established blogs or websites to gain backlinks. Quality backlinks ensure that you get noticed by correct audiences in their searches.
- Enhances organic ranking – As soon as Google starts viewing your site as an authority, you are rewarded with a high ranking on SERPs. Remember, Google prioritizes sites that offer users helpful information on regularly searched topics. It means you gain many quality backlinks, which makes Google presume your site to be an influential and credible information source around a specific topic.
[Important tip – Quality backlinks build gradually, so you will need to have patience. Stay away from using deceptive ways for increasing backlinks. You may get backlinks and traffic but eventually, your ranking will decline in search engine indexing and ranking. It is the quality of links that matter the most and not the volume!]
- Increases brand awareness – When a website connects to your site with a link, it indicates that they feel that their followers will benefit from what your website has to offer. Quality backlinks are always from reliable and relevant sites. Followers of those blogs are recommended to visit your website. You can create great landing pages with internal linking to direct them to useful and relevant content they came in search for. It keeps them engaged on your site and they spread more time. Google considers this while ranking your site.
- Boosts referral traffic – Google analytics tracks the click you get from another website as a referral visit. Referral traffic is more relevant and targeted, which does not add to the bounce rate. So, backlinks contribute a lot to boosting referral traffic.
- Enhances domain authority – Google considers the quality and quantity of inbound links connecting to your website. The backlinks quality is based on the domain authority score of the website it is directed from. If the backlink is coming from an established publishing blog, then their domain authority will be passed on to yours.
- Gain a competitive edge – With competitor analysis, your brand gains an insight into the websites or blogs they are receiving links from. You can target the same sources and acquire links, but ensure that the content you write is engaging.
- Create long-term resource links – Create a rich database of high-quality links from reliable and established resources to drive traffic even in the future.
- Build long-term relationships – Well-built links bring together one business website with another, as well as with new consumers without the need for search engine ranking.
The greatest advantage is backlinks attract more backlinks naturally without even asking!
When to Build Backlinks?
Startups must invest in building backlinks
Building quality link is time-consuming and startups don’t have the luxury. They need to invest in building quality backlinks early to place their brand on top, and to enhance dominance in the niche.
It helps startups to –
- Increase visibility on search engines
- Helps in creating brand awareness
- Expands your outreach and network
- Establishes your brand authority
To stay ahead of competitors
Competitive research will help you identify more about competitors’ digital marketing strategies, including link building methods that they are employing to gain visibility and ranking.
The competitive research helps you to see –
- What influencers do they connect to?
- Blogs or websites they are pursuing as guest bloggers.
- You can analyze the content created by your competitors so that you can make yours more interesting and engaging.
Competitors’ backlinks & opportunities can help you take your backlink-building strategy to the next level.
Your website is getting low traffic or losing ranking
Assuming that the SEO on your website is correct, but even then you are not getting sufficient traffic. Internal linking is good but search engines look for external links pointing to your website. So, you need to start Guest Posting to build backlinks. Remember, the other website owners only agree to send their readers, if they are sure that your website will offer them more useful information.
It means that you will need to create awesome content for your website, and even for publishing the posts as a guest to get quality backlinks. To gain quality backlinks, ensure that the content written is exclusive and is posted on relevant, authoritative, and user-friendly websites or blogs.
Why do backlinks have enduring importance?
Backlinks and SEO are interconnected. You cannot imagine one without another. Individually they don’t work great. It is nearly impossible to rank without backlinks.
Backlinks have enduring importance because –
- Google bots find new pages via links. The search engines use backlinks as pathways to crawl, find, and index website pages. Lots of backlinks increase the chance of fast finding, fast indexing, and high ranking. It is a navigation tool for Google and having several quality backlinks helps in boosting the average time it could take for the SEO to work.
- Backlinks are a reputation management tool for Google. Google is not human and even if the algorithms are created smartly, the program has no human brain. When deciding which website is worthy of top rankings they use backlinks. Search engine aims to offer searchers the best user query experience, so they will never point seekers towards irrelevant or poor content. They will point them towards popular websites because trust and a good reputation are always associated with high DA websites.
Try to aim for publishing content and links on high DA sites with 40+ scores as they have a vast and established audience so that the chances to enhance your website traffic increase.