There are several key components of SEO strategies and one of the most important is backlinking. You’ve probably heard the term mentioned by SEO experts but don’t really know what it means, or why it’s important.
I want to give you the low down and explain the importance of backlinking as a part of your SEO campaigns. To give you a brief introduction, a backlink is a link placed on an external website that points back to your website. They are useful in demonstrating your domain authority, and helping crawlers index your web content.
In this guide we delve into backlinking in greater detail including examples, their benefits, and how to create quality backlinks. For more information, or to get expert backlink assistance, you can contact us today to arrange a strategy session.
What is a Backlink?
Google defines a backlink as:
“A backlink is a link on a page from another site that links to a page on your site. It links back to your site.”
Straightforward enough! They can also be known as incoming links, inbound links, or just links. They are an integral part of SEO and allow people and crawlers to navigate the internet and find new website content.
Without backlinks, every website on the internet would be isolated and you would only be able to find them via search engines. Think of backlinks as the strands of web that make up the internet and mesh it together.
Backlink Example
Let’s look at a simple example. We have two websites – one is a respected gardening resource and blog. The other is a gardening supplies website.
The owner of the gardening supplies website might approach the resource website to create a guest post on their site about maintaining your garden tools effectively. Within this article, the gardening supplies website includes a link that points back to their range of gardening tools. This is a backlink.
We would say that the gardening supplies website has received a backlink from the gardening resources website.
It’s that simple. But as you will see below, the process is more complicated and things like authority, quality, and relevance determine how valuable that backlink is.
Four Benefits of Backlinks for Your Business
So, you’ve got a clear idea of what backlinks are, but why should you care? In terms of SEO, backlinks should form a cornerstone of your strategies together with other things like website optimisation, local SEO, and content marketing. They are that important, and I explain why below.
1. To Help Search Engine Crawlers Discover Your Website
We use links to navigate between websites, explore new pages, and find new content. Search engines do this too and it’s an important part of how they find and index websites for their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Search engines like Google use crawlers (or bots) to scuttle around the web, jumping from link to link to find and digest new content. Because of this, the more backlinks you have, the more chance you have of these bots stumbling across your web content.
All it takes is a starting point. For example, let’s say you have a guest post on a high-authority website with a backlink to one of your blog posts. The Googlebot might be crawling that website, find the guest post, and see the link to your blog. From there the crawler could then jump onto your website and start indexing it – fantastic.
2. Boost Domain Authority
When you buy something from Amazon, you probably look at the customer reviews. If you saw a detailed review from a trusted Amazon customer, or a one-line review from a customer with no purchase history, who would you trust?
This is the principle of domain authority. Search engines look at the frequency and quality of your backlinks to determine your domain authority, and if you are a trusted source of information, worthy of higher rankings.
So, the more high-quality backlinks you get (i.e. from reputable websites with plenty of traffic and relevant content), the better your standing is with Google and other search engines. Your domain authority is established which helps place you above your competition.
3. To Direct Traffic Back to Your Web Content
Aside from the technical aspects, at their most basic usage, backlinks drive traffic to your website. More traffic equals more visitors which should hopefully result in more enquiries and business.
Let’s think of it in a numbers term. If your website has no backlinks and nothing pointing back towards your web content, you are limiting yourself to being found on search engine results pages.
In contrast, if you had 10 quality backlinks plus a fantastic SEO strategy, you still get plenty of traffic from search engine results pages, but also have 10 external outlets where customers could find your business.
4. Boost Keyword Placement
Backlinks can be used as part of your keyword strategies. This is because you can use primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text for the backlink content. The anchor text and link must be relevant to the third-party website and the content they link back too, but still, they can contribute to your keyword efforts.
What Makes a Good Backlink?
Not all backlinks are good! If your backlink profile consists of a lot of spam links, then your domain authority will continue to stay low. Also, if your backlink profile contains a large number of paid for backlinks then you may even be at risk of a manual action. A manual action results in a severe penalty from Google and large ranking drops.
I’ve outlined the three core principles that you need to achieve to create high-quality backlinks below. You can also find out more info in our free SEO guide, and host of free webinars.
The Backlink is Earned or “Natural”
There’s no secret that you can pay for backlinks. You can find websites dedicated to backlink farming – they are usually generic news websites or old domains that have been repurposed. Businesses pay to feature something like a guest post on the third-party website with a backlink.
This should be avoided, and you should strive to earn backlinks naturally. By naturally, we mean that you have come to a mutual agreement with the website owner to obtain that backlink.
They wanted to give you that linking opportunity because they see the value of your business, partnership, and content – not because you’ve paid them! Why is this important? It’s because Google can sniff out unnatural links. If found out, repeat offenses can actually damage your domain authority and search engine rankings especially if a manual action is applied.
The Linked-From Website is Reputable/High-Authority
Think of a backlink as a form of testimonial or review. By giving you that linking opportunity, the third-party website is essentially giving you their nod of approval. They are stating you are trusted, and your content is worthwhile.
It stands to reason, therefore, that the reputation and authority of the website giving the nod of approval also matters. Indeed, Google has its PageRank system which defines the authority and reputation of web pages, and this is applied to the sites your backlinks are placed on.
So, don’t just obtain backlinks from any website! The third-party websites must be high-authority and have an excellent reputation. This can be difficult to assess because Google no longer offers a PageRank metric you can use to measure a website’s reputation.
Instead, you should look at things like content quality, website traffic, and the number of quality backlinks they already have.
The Link and Anchor Text are Relevant to the Page’s Content
The last major factor is relevancy. The best backlinks are relevant to the webpage and website they are placed on.
Let’s look at a scenario. You have an interior design business and there is an opportunity to create a guest post including a backlink on a reputable news outlet. The news outlet covers generic stories like current affairs, tech, investments, and the environment. Do you think this would create a relevant backlink? No.
The websites and your own subjects are too different. Instead, a more relevant backlink would be a guest post on something like a home improvement website, or furniture retailer’s website. Search engines factor-in relevancy when ranking web content.
You must go one step further than the relevancy of the web page though. The anchor text (the word or phrase that is used as the link to your website) must be relevant to both the content it is placed in, and what it links too.
Start Building Your Backlink Profile Today and Boost Your Domain Authority
You should now have a clear idea of the importance of backlinking. Now you have to look at obtaining those high-authority, relevant links and this presents a new challenge in itself.
There are many backlink strategies such as creating linkable assets (blogs, guides, studies, etc.), guest posts, and capitalising on broken links and repurposing them.
The starting point is analysing any existing backlinks you have to assess their quality. From there, you can look at obtaining new links to further boost your SEO. This is something we can help with using our years of experience, so please reach out if you have any questions.
