The Importance of Backlinks and how to gain best
Backlinks : People, who are practicing SEO or have heard about it, must also have heard of a concept called ‘backlinking’. However, if you do not know much about SEO, backlink may still be an unknown thing to you. From the SEO standpoint, backlinks are extremely important. The truth is that they are one of the basic building blocks of SEO. The following text will highlight their importance.
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What are backlinks?
- The meaning of backlink is pretty simple. Let’s say you are reading a blog on the internet. In the blog, you come across an external link which directs you to another website.
- The link is very likely related to the content of the blog you were reading. It directed you to another page for more information or in order to complete the transaction.
- In the simplest terms, the link which directed you to another website from the blog is the backlink for that website. These backlinks are also referred to as ‘inbound links’. The higher the number of backlinks to your website, the higher will be its page ranking on Google.
- This is the importance of backlinks. Google or any other search engine considers your website to be important for search queries if it has higher backlinks.
The importance of backlinks
As mentioned above the search engines will relate search queries or keywords entered by the users to your website if it has higher number of quality backlinks. But don’t forget to note the word ‘quality’ here. It is important for the website to generate high quality links.
But backlinking is not just about search engines. If you have a higher number of backlinks on the authority websites, you will also get more traffic. In fact, this is the cornerstone of backlinking. When there are more backlinks, search engines consider the site to be more useful to the people.
What is a quality backlink?
So the big question is how search engines like Google know that any backlink is a quality backlink. Here is a quick look:
- First of all, the content of the website that has the backlinks to your site is checked by search engines. They determine if the content of both the sites is similar or related. If there is no relation then the backlink is rendered irrelevant. In simple words, the more the relevance the higher will be the quality of the backlink.
- Let’s take a look at an example. If your website is about travel and tourism and there is a blog about same niche containing your backlink, it will instantly be considered relevant. However, if your website is about gadgets and the link is inserted on the site about ‘yoga’, it will be considered as a bad backlink.
- The backlinks that are added slowly and naturally are given more importance by the search engines. In fact, trying to manipulate the search engines like Google by creating high number of backlinks can actually backfire. The search engines will be able to figure out if the backlinks were added naturally or they were inserted as the part of the SEO strategy.
- So, it becomes important to build the backlinks slowly over a period of time. If you have good content that adds value to the users, you will naturally get more backlinks. So, focus more on the content and let the backlinks get built naturally.
Tread Carefully
- Backlinking is a good strategy but you must tread carefully. Do not try to deceive the search engines as it might lead to penalties. Create value added content and let the links build naturally.
- Even if you have multiple websites, do not create excessive backlinks. Especially if you are hosting these websites from the same IP address, Google will immediately figure something fishy is going.
- Reciprocal linking is good where you backlink someone’s site in order to get a backlink on their site. But remember, you have to make sure that both the sites have relevant content.