Backlinks and their Importance in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Knowing how to build high-quality backlinks will increase your search engine rank and help you generate more traffic from search engine result pages (SERPs). Backlinks are links from external sites that direct back to your website. Search Engines consider each backlink to be a vote for your site and the more votes you have, the more popular you appear. Aside from the vote factor, these links help search engines learn more about your site’s purpose. Having quality backlinks will:
- Increase your search engine rank and visibility
- Increase your website popularity
- Increase your targeted traffic
Collecting backlinks are the primary objective when optimizing for off-page SEO. Off-page SEO are actions you will perform outside of your website that will have an impact on your site’s ranking with search engines. Search engines have one main goal and that’s to provide people with relevant searches.
The information gathered from these links, and your website content is used to determine your placement in searches. To achieve a higher placement in SERPs, your backlinks should come from authority websites. These sites typically provide quality content and are trusted. Important factors to consider when accumulating links are:
- Link Relevance – Be sure your backlinks are coming from relevant websites. It won’t help you if the website does not relate to your niche.
- Website PageRank – Get links from highly ranked websites.
- Anchor Text – Make sure the link text gives the user a relevant description about the link.
- One-way links – Try to get sites to link to your site without having to reciprocate the link.
Get backlinks by providing great content
The best way to get backlinks is to provide quality content on your site that other websites will want to link back to. Here are a few ideas:
- Have a blog and post useful content on your niche
- Provide a free game
- Provide a free online tool
- Give something away (E-books, Document Templates, Reports, etc.)
Link Building Tools
Link building tools are a great way to find backlink opportunities. SEMrush, a leader in search engine marketing tools, provides a link building tool that will:
- Find websites that can improve your search rankings
- Reach out to site owners to get backlinks
- Track and monitor websites that are currently linking back to your site
- Monitor your link-building progress
- Inform you when a backlink has been removed
- Conduct deep link analysis
- Help you learn about your competitors’ marketing and PR strategies
Having high-quality backlinks can dramatically improve your search engine ranking and get you closer to the top of search results. It may take some time and effort, but it’s well worth it. For more tips on how to improve your SEO strategy, be sure to sign up to receive future blog posts.