What Are Backlinks & Does Your Business Need Them?
No website exists as an island. The internet is an interconnected meshwork of highways that all connect, lead to, and link back to one another. If your goal is to gain more traffic online, then becoming part of that web should be a primary objective. A major cornerstone of that process is backlinks.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are inbound links: they are links from other websites that direct users toward your own. All popular websites use backlinks to drive their traffic, and those same sites typically maintain a healthy number of outbound links leading to other reputable sources as well.
Getting your website linked from another well-regarded site is a great way to increase traffic and reach a new audience, but backlinks also serve another function. They signal to both users and search engines that your website is reliable and worth checking out, which in turn boosts your site's overall authority.
How Do Backlinks Help SEO?
Search engines such as Google operate essentially as complex databases of crawled webpages. How Google chooses to serve those pages, and how efficiently it can do so, determines website rankings throughout its index. When a website generates a high number of backlinks from other authoritative sites, it signals to Google that your site is authoritative, too.
Building trust and authority through backlinks shows search engines that your site can be trusted. In turn, this can help your website get crawled and indexed faster by Google's search engine "spiders" (the bots that automatically scan and store web pages in its catalog).
What Makes a Quality Backlink?
As the internet grows, so does the complexity of search algorithms. So much content is published online every day that Google has had to devise more elegant and intricate ways to sort through all that data. There was a time when the raw number of backlinks alone was enough for a new website to rank in search results, but today the process requires more finesse.
Not all backlinks are created equal. In order to gain authority online, the links directing people to your site must also be authoritative themselves. Quality backlinks must be:
Relevant: Coming from (and leading to) pages within a closely related niche.
Authoritative: Coming from trusted, well-established sites in your industry.
UX-Friendly: Anchored within a natural phrase and seamlessly embedded in the body text.
Many online outlets understand how Google ranks sites within its index, and as a result, some attempt tactics to trick the system. In the past, high backlink volume alone could earn traffic, leading to sites that stuffed keywords, links, and other data to bypass search guidelines.
For this reason, Google prioritizes quality far more than before, and a single strong backlink can be enough to jumpstart a website's online presence.
How to Earn High-Quality Backlinks
Building backlinks doesn't mean buying links or spamming web forums, both of which can lead to Google penalties.
The main purpose of search engines is to make the user experience as convenient and effortless as possible. As such, the best way to earn backlinks is to create content that is genuinely worthy of them. Publish comprehensive guides, original research, informative blog posts, or technical documents designed to provide maximum value to your audience.
Delivering real value is the most effective way to attract the attention of users, websites, and search algorithms alike. Guest blogging with reliable business partners is a great way to start, as is ensuring your business is listed in official directories like Google Business Profile or local Chamber of Commerce sites.
Acquiring backlinks takes time, but it's one of the most efficient ways to boost your visibility, outrank competitors, and grow your business online.
If you need help building the authority your business needs to succeed, our marketing experts at Knack Social are here to help. Get a professional SEO audit and build a marketing strategy that will generate leads for years to come!