You must have come upon the term ‘Backlink’ if you have ever read about SEO, Search Engine Optimization. It greatly helps by boosting up worth traffic towards your website. For those who do not know anything about SEO or those who are new to this term, understanding what is a Backlink and why is it important to include them in your website.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are the inward links which directs right to your blog or a website. They are most commonly known as in-links or inbound links. They are very essential when it comes to Search Engine Optimization as higher the number of backlinks, the more credible your blog or website becomes in the eyes of every search engines.
Why are Backlinks important?
Backlinks basically let you to have track of every single page available on the web that links to your posts. Today, they have become an important part of Search Engine Optimization. Each time you build up a new backlink, the chances of getting your website indexed by various search spiders increases. It is said that a greater number of backlinks leads to better popularity of websites and blogs.
A number of search engines consider the backlinks to be a major factor for deciding a rank amongst various web pages in their ranking algorithm. Even Google have said that each backlink means one vote from another website, which means that the number of backlinks used in a website is a clear indication of how popular, credible and relevant that website is.
Having quality backlinks
There is a simple rule ‘higher the relevance of backlinks, greater will be their quality, and vice versa.’
Backlinks are the basic building block of a good Search Engine Optimization. While calculating a site’s relevance to a particular keyword, the search engines always consider the number of good quality backlinks to a website. It is not that only the number matters in the case of backlinks, the quality and content that it relates to a given keyword is equally important.
The quality of an inbound link is determined solely by its content. When inbound links comes to your site, somewhere from the other sites, these links are known to be very relevant to your website. If the inbound link on your website has any kind of content that do not relate to the given keyword, they will not be considered relevant and hence, the credibility of your website will be lost.
It is to be noted that relevant and valuable backlinks are two important scrutinizers. Sometimes it happens that Search Engine Optimizers try to manipulate or operate a search engine, if that is the case, the only legitimate way is to have high-quality backlinks which will increase the position of the website in a search engine index.
For example: If you are a webmaster and your website has a keyword that relates to travelling France and you receive a backlink from some other website that relates to the travel cost of Italy, then this link will be considered as an irrelevant link.
Webmasters often use more than 2 websites and for them, linking those websites helps your SEO efforts, however, it is not always true. This can hold good only when both website do not have the same IP, which means that if all websites are hosted on a single server, Google will take no time to penalize you.
A large number of bloggers usually exchange links through blogroll, where one blogger can easily link to another blogger and vice versa. This helps in spreading word about a new bog or website. But before you do that, it is important to be very careful about the one you are linking your blog with, as linking to bad corners may end up harming you in long run.
Building Backlinks
It is obvious by now that good quality backlinks are an inexplicable part of Search Engine Optimization success. Now the question remains, how to build these backlinks. Before starting building up your backlinks, you need to consider few things. It helps greatly if you keep a track of all your inbound links, knowing what sites are linking to your websites and how exactly inbound link’s anchor text incorporates those keywords which relate to your website. A tool that will help you do this is the Domain starts Tool. Google regards the inbound links coming from this tool highly important and relevant.
With the option of on-page optimization, it becomes easier because everything is in your hands, you can decide and do as you like, but with backlinks, it seems that you are relying on others instead of working for your own success. However, this is not the complete truth because though inbound links start from some other sites and directs towards yours, you can still discuss the details like anchor text, with other site’s web master. This may not be same as administrating your own site as you cannot have complete control over all the backlinks, yet there are a number of aspects for negotiation.
Importance of Quality links
It is ok to exchange inlinks until you are doing it with a trustful website, otherwise it would be dangerous for your site or blog. To get clearer with, let us understand the two types of incoming links to your website:
One Way Backlinks: If you have one-way backlinks, you are sure to get more value and better results. One Way incoming links are those kinds of links that top to your site from other sites. It guarantees better search positions, provides you more valuable and better audience, mainly from search robots.
Reciprocal Links: They might not be popular these days but in its latest update, Google said that reciprocal links were found to be the target among the latest filters of search engines. Many webmasters prefer these to boost the rankings of their website but according to Google, many of such links were not relevant and hence, were discounted, and large numbers of websites were removed from Google Maps.
Conclusion
Backlinks are extremely essential to SEO, and their importance, quality content and uniqueness makes them a priority in SEO efforts. This helps other trustful websites recognize you as a credible one and hence, link them to yours.