What are Backlinks - Importance & Effect on SEO?

Every blogger, small or big no matter, wants to have high traffic on their blogs. Backlinks are a way of getting high traffic to blogs.

If you’ve read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you’ve come across the term “backlink” at least once. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO.

For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. So, let’s see the following post about Backlinks – what are they – importance of backlinks and how it helps in SEO.

What is a backlink?

Backlinks are incoming links or inbound links or inlinks or inward links to a website or a web page.

Or

Back links are the links that link BACK to your site.

or

“Backlink” is a term that refers to links that point to a website or webpage from another website.

Back links

Backlinks vs Inbound links vs Outbound links

Some newbie bloggers might have confusion among backlinks, inbound links and outbound links.

So let’s have a look over them.

Inbound links (IBLs) are the links to your website from other websites.

Back links = inbound links

Outbound Links (OBLs) are the ones from your website to other websites.

A link from website ‘A’ referring to website ‘B’ is an outbound link for ‘A’. Similarly, for website ‘B’, this link is an inbound link, driving traffic its way.

Outbound links are like our blog’s neighbours.

Importance of Backlinks

Backlinks on other sites increase a website’s traffic. Website owners often try to increase the number of visitors that their sites receive by increasing the number of backlinks to their sites.

There are several ways by which back links can be created. (ways to build backlinks will be provided later on, on this web)

All of them might increase a site’s traffic, simply because Internet users will have more opportunities to click on links to the site, but not all types of backlinks will improve a site’s search engine ranking.

This is because most search engines will evaluate the quality of the backlink based on things such as the popularity and nature of the site from which it originates.

For example, a backlink from a website that exists only to provide backlinks to other sites — usually for a fee — is unlikely to improve a site’s search engine ranking.

Effect on SEO

Links are like roads or paths to your content or to your blog.

Think of the phrase “All roads lead to Rome”. When Rome ruled the known world indeed it seemed like all roads did lead to Rome because Rome built many roads to the capital city to facilitate trade and movement of armies. Some of the roads were heavily highways, and others were little footpaths but they all brought traffic to the capital.

If you want popular powerful content that gets lots of traffic you need lots of links (roads) and some nice big wide roads (blogs with good ranking) with lots of traffic (links with lots of internet traffic).

Your link building strategy is a big part of web page optimization, and getting individual web pages (or blog posts) to rank well in the major search engines – particularly Google.

Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will favour websites that contain a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Backlinks are like votes for your website. The more backlinks your site receives the higher it will rank.

Back links

For effective link building, it’s important to understand the following four elements – and how they are used to determine website rankings.

Linking

A link allows an Internet user to click on it to navigate to  a different webpage. When the webpage that is opened is on a completely different website from the one where the link appeared, the link would be considered a backlink for that new site. The word or phrase usually will be highlighted in some way, such as in bold type or underlined, to let the reader know that it can be clicked on to follow a link.

Link Popularity

Link Popularity refers to the number of links that point to your site, from other sites. This is considered in the ranking criteria because popular sites, or well-written content, should naturally attract inbound links. Each inbound link is counted as a vote. The more votes you have, the more search engines consider your site a quality source in their ranking algorithm.

Link Reputation

Not all inbound links are created equal. The quantity and quality of your inbound links will determine how well your site ranks.

Link Reputation defines the quality of your links, and is based on relevance. Relevance is determined by both the Anchor Text linked to your URL and the relevance between the pages that are linked.

In a natural setting a pet site may link to a cat site or a dog site. This is considered a relevant link. An unnatural connection would be that same pet site linking to a casino site, which is obviously not relevant.

Just as society judges you by the company that you keep, major search engines judge your web pages by the company that they keep… or the pages that they link to and get links from.

 

For successful search engine optimization (SEO), it is not just the content of one’s site that is important, but the site’s appearance in other places on the internet is also important.

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