What is a backlink and its significance?
A backlink is a hyperlink from an external website to yours.
1. In an analogy, a backlink can be considered as modern day word of mouth.
In simple words, when other websites are linking to your site or referring you that speaks volumes about the relevance of the content on your website.
2. The web is full of sites that includes a variety of sites, some are spammy while others are really well structured and the content is extremely in sync w.r.t their niche.
One of the biggest tasks for search engines is to pull out the junk and present the user with all quality websites in the search results.
3. Backlinks can also be considered as a quantifiable way for search engines like google to measure how well other people on the internet think of your site and how it should be positioned in comparison to others sites that are competing in the same domain.
4. Equally true is the fact, that all backlinks are not of equal value. Google looks for natural and contextual links.
Greater the number of websites that link to your site, the more confident Google’s algorithm is regarding your site offering content that would be valuable to other people.
Why backlinks matter?
I have listed out few of the major reasons on why backlinks matter and you should try to maintain a strong backlinks profile:
1. Increase traffic & organic ranking
Primarily, links help to improve your ranking. Google loves those sites that have a high number of backlinks.
If you have a strong backlink profile, this would be enough for getting displayed in Google’s top search results.
With more quality backlinks pointing to your domain, the traffic on your site would surely shoot up. As the backlinks bring traffic to your domains, your ranking will also increase eventually.
2. A signal of strength to Google search crawler
When a search engine encounters a contextual backlink to a domain, it considers your domain to be informative, relevant and also worth showing to more & more people.
Also, search engines like Google considers your content valid for the user and place it over the pages with fewer backlinks.
3. High Domain Authority/Page Authority
Domain authority is score developed by Moz which predicts how well a website would do on SERP and how relevant is it to the industry it’s operating in.
Backlinks from the high-quality website also increase your DA/PA(provided the sites are relevant as per your niche).
However, not all the backlinks are of equal value. The links from irrelevant and spammy sites can have the opposite effect and google might penalize you for the same.
4. Faster indexing
If you have got high number of backlinks from relevant sites, your content will surely be indexed faster.
This is because the domain pointing towards yours will already be indexed well, so along with that domain, even your content will index in a better way accordingly.
Conclusion:
Backlinks are important especially if you want to build a successful business online. All the seven above listed reasons to check backlinks are crucial if you want to succeed in internet marketing.
However, it is really important to check backlinks on a regular basis to ensure that they do not hurt your brand image, online presence, marketing efforts and link building.
The primary focus should be to understand the kind of links that would be helpful for your site and get rid of all those that aren’t.
Jessica Smith is a Digital Marketing Expert who helps clients increase their revenues by improving their organic traffic(With primary focus on keyword rankings, backlink profile & on-page optimization) and building powerful campaigns through Google Adwords. She has been in the marketing industry for over ten years 10 years. Her core role is as the Principal Consultant at Outreachlinkbuilding.com, a USA based digital marketing agency specialising in SEO. She can be reached via email at jessica@outreach-crayon.com.
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