The role of Backlinks in SEO-
If you’ve read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you’ve come across the term “backlink” at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important.
What is Backlink ?
A “backlink” is one of the most used words in the world of search engine optimization (SEO).
Backlink is a link one website gets from another website. Backlinks make a huge impact on a website’s prominence in search engine results.
This is why they are considered very useful for improving a website’s SEO ranking. Search engines calculate rankings using multiple factors to display search results. No one knows for sure how much weight search engines give to backlinks when listing results, however what we do know for certain is that they are very important.
Backlinks should be natural, this means that a website must not use artificial ways to create backlinks for their own websites. The quality of links is far more important than the quantity.
Importance of backlink
The Role of Backlinks In SEO
Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.
When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site.
If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.
For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine’s assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.
The Role of Backlinks In SEO
Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites.
This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites.
These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.
Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can’t build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let’s talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.
Here is a glossary of common terms related to backlinks that you should know:
Link Juice: When a webpage links to any of your articles or your website’s homepage, it passes “link juice”. This link juice helps with the ranking of the article, and also improves the domain authority. As a blogger, you can stop passing link juice by using a no-follow tag.
No-Follow Link: When a website links to another website, but the link has a no-follow tag, that link does not pass link juice. No-follow links are not useful concerning the ranking of a page as they do not contribute anything. In general, a webmaster uses the no-follow tag when he/she is linking out to an unreliable site.
Do-Follow Link: By default, all the links that you add to a blog post are do-follow links and these pass link juice.
Linking Root Domains: This refers to the number of backlinks coming into your website from a unique domain. Even if a website has linked to your website ten times, it will only be considered as one linked root domain.
Low-Quality Links: Low-quality links are links that come from harvested sites, automated sites, spam sites, or even porn sites.
Such links do far more harm than good. This is one reason you should be careful when buying backlinks.
Internal Links: Links that are going from one page to another within the same domain are called internal links. The process itself is referred to as internal linking or interlinking.
Anchor Text: Text that is used for hyperlinks is called anchor text. Anchor text backlinks work great when you are trying to rank for particular keywords.
Conclusion
Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.
We hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links.
The role of Backlinks in SEO-