If you have been embarking on expanding SEO for your website or business, you may have come across backlinks, and thus you may wonder, “What is a backlink?” SEO backlinks are a simply clickable link from another website to your website. High-quality backlinks have incredible power and the potential to skyrocket your site; especially if you are in e-commerce or selling services and/or products. Backlinks can increase your ranking on all search engines whilst improving your visibility in search, translating to even more links pointing to your website and therefore increased traffic.
Backlinking is just one important aspect of many in SEO. Since backlinking occurs off your website, it’s referred to as off-page SEO rather than on-page SEO, which focuses on the content on your site. High-quality backlinks are actually endorsements; they are recommendations from another website or organisation to view your content and to learn more about a specific topic.
Ultimately, from a technical perspective, backlinks are how search engines determine the authoritativeness score and relevancy of your website for search queries. The more authoritative your website content (the higher the score), the more Google will reward you. This makes backlinking necessary for SEO.
Significance of Backlinks
Now that you understand what a backlink is, you may wonder why they are so significant. SEO backlinks enable website growth in many ways. If you want to rank on the first page of any Search Engine Results Page (SERPs), you’ll need to stand out from your competition.
Backlinks in SEO improve your rank because the Google algorithm uses the quality and quantity of the backlinks links as authoritativeness score; this can be considered votes of confidence from other websites and businesses. Therefore, the more backlinks your website has, the higher it can rank for search terms. While this isn’t always the case, it can increase your page rankings for relevant search terms. However, there are many other factors to consider, such as on-page SEO and page speed.
Building Backlinks
Backlink building also makes it easier for people to find your website on the web, improving your visibility. Search engines find content to crawl by revisiting pages they’ve already crawled, focusing on the most popular ones. When you begin backlinking, search engines may discover your content easier.
Additionally, backlinking may provide you with more website visitors through referral traffic. Individuals who read a popular website may click on your backlinks, directing them to a relevant page where they can find more information about a particular topic.
Backlinks can also boost your domain authority score. This score is essentially how the internet ranks your website during a search, that is, how close to the first position you will appear in a Google search.
While domain authority is not an official Google ranking factor, many SEO tools use this metric to help identify ways to improve your strategy by comparing you to the competition. Ultimately, the higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to earn top spots on SERPs. Therefore, even though domain authority isn’t a ranking factor, using it to measure your improvement can help you determine if your efforts are improving your rankings.
Backlinks also increase brand awareness online. Companies should never stop investing in brand awareness campaigns because they must always attract new customers by highlighting new products and services. By earning backlinks from authoritative websites that get thousands of monthly visitors, you can increase your brand awareness by reaching the other website’s visitors.
