What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important In SEO
As you are probably aware SEO includes many different factors that contribute to the whole idea of SEO. For any good SEO strategy is highly advisable that you included backlinks within your website. Your website as a whole will have many combining factors that will contribute to your ranking status and link building is one of those contributing factors.
There are two forms of link building; inbound links and outbound links. Outbound links are defined by links that point from your website to another, and logically. links on other websites that point to your site are called backlinks or inbound links.
Below our inhouse link building London team discuss in brief what backlinks are and why they are important to your SEO strategy.
What is a Backlink in SEO?
Backlinks is an off-page ranking factor in the fact that it is one of the most important elements to generating web traffic through other web domains.
As mentioned, backlinks refers to links that are generated by other websites that link back to yours. Now as this is an off-page factor, it is something we have less control over and cannot guarantee that we can get quality links. Backlinks are only considered quality worthy if they are generated from a reputable company/website or more importantly one with a high DA (domain authority).
If a link is originated from a less reputable company it has a lower effect and can impact the way your website is perceived. It is is only natural that links coming from high quality sites with relevant and valued content is valued much higher and increases your visibility in Google rankings.
Google will determine the quality of your backlinks through the popularity and trustworthiness of the linking site. Google have may algorithms and practices in place to ensure that you are using white hat practices in obtaining these backlinks.
It is of the upmost importance to be careful to ensure that you obtain backlinks organically and do not fall trap to obtaining them through black hat practices. Many websites have been blacklisted from Google search results, crippling their business, due to buying or gaining backlinks against Googles TOS.
Why Are Backlinks Important in SEO?
Backlinks in SEO is universally accepted to be of high importance and relevance to any website domain for any SEO expert. Google algorithms are not public information so we do have to to some speculation on its criteria from time to time. With that being said, its been seen on every SEO project that Google deems a site as reputable partly in part due to how other websites link or don’t link to said website. This is obviously logical when you think of machine learning and makes sense as the only real criteria than can be used on the billions of websites online.
There are three obvious and immediate benefits SEO backlinks can provide to you and your business website:
- Improved website traffic due to SERP rankings.
- Improved site popularity due to exposure.
- Improved authority within niches and industries.
Many websites will put their every soul and effort into achieving good quality backlinks, but in today’s SEO world it is not about quantity of backlinks but rather quality.
Search engines give more credibility to those websites with 5 quality backlinks as apposed to those with 20 low quality backlinks. In fact it would be correct to state that 20 bad backlinks is worse than no backlinks at all!
Building backlinks can be a timely and difficult task, however you need to remember that building reputable and quality backlinks takes time and is better in the long run of SEO strategies and business sustainability.
Patience is a virtue and if done correctly you will continue to grow and increase your web presence whilst ultimately being recognised by Google as a reputable company.
If you have any queries or would like assistance in obtaining a better SEO strategy with backlinks please feel free to get in contact with our London based SEO experts today.
