The Importance of Backlinks
What is the importance of backlinks when it comes to SEO?
Backlinks are so important that they deserve a special focus of their own.
Backlinks are links from other websites that head directly back to your site. As such, they are also known as inbound links. Backlinks go a long way towards ‘convincing’ search engines that your site is worth linking to. As a matter of fact, if you get a lot of them, most especially if they are from reputable sites, it can definitely help bump up your website’s rankings. They can add considerably to your site’s popularity with search engines because some search engines prefer sites that have a large number of sites that backlink to them. They thus equate popularity with reliability and importance; it’s as if other sites are voting for your site by backlinking to it – which makes quite a bit of sense. This is why your website is assigned a “trust rank” based on the number of backlinks you get and their quality.
So what makes for a quality backlink?
First and foremost, the site that added the backlink needs to link back to your site using the keyword or keyphrase that your site is optimized for. Your site needs to be known for that keyword or keyphrase, in other words.
Next, the website linking back to your own site should ideally have a focus similar to yours, and as such should have similar content to your own site. For example, if your site is concerned with car, a backlink from another site that focused on cars as well would be considered more relevant that a site that focused on, say, wallpaper instead. If sites that backlink to your own site are indeed concerned with similar topics, that can definitely translate to higher relevance as far as those backlinks are concerned – and, in turn, this translates to higher overall backlink quality. Considered most desirable are sites whose behavior is such that they are able to slowly but steadily put together a list of quality backlinks over a relatively long period of time. And, by connection, considered undesirable are those unscrupulous sites that do just the opposite and build a large number of mostly low- to middling-quality backlinks very quickly. That sort of behavior is very evident; it is one of the behaviors that search engines and their administrators look out for, and once caught, someone and his website can very easily be banned or blacklisted for such behavior.
So what is a good way to get other sites to incorporate backlinks to yours? Since there is no way to force top sites like CNN or the New York Times to do so, one great way would be to keep your site updated as often as you can with high-quality and unique content, and to publicize this content whenever you upload it. People will find out that you are publishing content that they would want to read or keep abreast of, and would put up backlinks to your site as a result. Slowly but surely – that’s the way to go when it comes to building backlinks.
It’s been suggested that one way for a site to build good backlinks is to build a network of sites which backlink to each other – this is called reciprocal linking. As a matter of fact, you can get started by backlinking to other sites that themselves are concerned with what your site is concerned with. If they are aiming to be SEO-enhanced they will recognize the importance of what you are doing and will sooner or later backlink not only to you but also to other similar sites. Such a network would thus enable all connected sites to greatly help each other out. However, a search engine such as Google is very careful with these sorts of links, since such as setup is quite open to abuse, so it is quite possible for a site’s rankings to drop if it makes one or two bad links, due to the strictness of some top search engines. So sites and their networks that put up reciprocal links need to be careful regarding the quality of the links themselves.
