06 Sep What are Backlinks? The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Backlinks are a vital part of SEO. More specifically, they’re an important part of off-page SEO. If you’ve been looking into how to get rankings from SEO, you’ve most likely read things that talk about backlinks and link building. You know that these things should be part of your SEO strategy, but maybe you’re not exactly sure why or where to start. What are backlinks? Why are they so important? And how can you get them right?
Despite the fact that backlinks are an essential factor in successful SEO, more than half of pages don’t have a single backlink. It’s crucial to understand them and why they matter so that you can build links to your site.
What Are Backlinks?
A backlink is a link on another website that links back to your website. For example, you might have a useful article on your website that someone else links to on their website. Backlinks are one of the factors taken into consideration in the Google algorithm and in other search engines. The number of backlinks and the quality of those links can affect how well your website ranks in search engine results. The quantity used to be the aim, but there is now a much larger focus on the quality of links. They should be relevant and come from high-ranking sites.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are important for SEO because they’re a top search engine ranking factor for websites. Google may one day move away from backlinks but for now, they are still one of the most important ranking factors for pages, if not the most important factor of all, once technical is in place.
Quality backlinks to your website show that your site has valuable and relevant content. It’s useful to not only your audience but the audience of other websites too. There are multiple different ranking factors to consider if you want to build quality backlinks. They include the PageRank (authority) of the referring page and domain, the anchor text of the backlink, and the age of the linking domain.
The Right vs. Wrong Way to Build Links
Building backlinks should be a key part of your SEO strategy, but there are right and wrong ways to do it. People used to aim to build as many backlinks as possible, but now it’s recognised that the quality of backlinks is important too. A link from a relevant, high-ranking site is worth more than a link from a directory listing.
One thing that you should make sure to avoid is paid backlinks. Paying for links could result in poor-quality links that do more harm than good. Google can even penalise you for buying backlinks instead of building them more organically. If you want to avoid your website taking a hit, make sure you build links through good SEO and not by buying them outright.
Building backlinks should be a part of any successful SEO strategy. It can involve a range of techniques that focus on creating quality content that others will want to link to. Google would prefer for links to be created naturally, but there are still plenty of strategies that you can use to encourage backlinks to your site.
How to Get More Backlinks
If you want more backlinks for your website, you can make use of various methods. You need to get it right if you want to avoid anything that Google might frown upon.
Firstly, make sure that you’re creating quality content that people want to link to. This is the most important factor if you want more backlinks. Quality content leads to quality links for relevant websites. Only about 4% of your articles will likely get quality backlinks so it’s important to optimise your content and focus on putting your audience first.
There are different types of content that you can focus on if you want to be successful. For example, roundup posts that collect the opinions of experts in your field can result in those people linking back to your post. Cornerstone posts can also be excellent pieces of content, linking out to your other articles and showing that you know what you’re talking about. They can be long, informative posts that encourage people to link to them. Infographics are excellent for sharing too, and you can even provide the code with a backlink to your website to make it easy for people to display your infographic and link to your site.
Backlinks form a vital part of SEO strategy, but there’s a right and wrong way to do them. If you want quality backlinks, focus on building them organically.
Need help with your website updates? Paul and his team are specialists! Schedule a free SEO Audit today.
