Backlinks are links that aren’t yours but those that divert the traffic online to your own page. These are also called inbound links because they are being diverted to your site from different sites. These backlinks are important when any search engine is trying to analyze the quality and quantity of your website for it to be listed under the top searches or to appear in the Search Engine Optimization. In order to explain this with an example, let us say that you own a house at location B and the direct way to your house is to go from A or to pass by A. But there are also other ways to reach your house and these are not direct ways but need to be diverted through location C or D or any other. So, your house here is your website and the path from A to B is the website link. But the ways from C, D are the backlinks and these are equally important in order to reach your house.
Different types of backlinks
- Natural backlinks: A natural link is one that is generated organically and not by you or your company. In other words, natural backlinks are those when bloggers, owners of other sites, reviewers, and anyone on the web mention your website when promoting their own content. This can be in order to earn monetary benefits or to add value to their content.
- Manual backlinks: Manual link is when you reach out to the owners and creators of other websites and ask them for you to be connected or linked to their website or content. However, this will need some convincing strategies before you can move to SEO strategies.
- Self-created links: These are non-editorial links that are created by tricking the search engines to think that your content is potentially good content and ticks on all the SEO parameters.
Why are backlinks important?
Google was one of the first search engines to recognize the importance of backlinks. Google used an algorithm to rank the web pages based on the popularity the links on these pages got when it was launched in 1998. And as the web world evolved so did the ways of the world. Today backlinks are very important and are an inter-dependency environment for the sites.
All backlinks matter as the more backlinks you get, the more the popularity your website gets. However, all the backlinks are not of the same value. It is always the quality of the backlink and never only about the quantity.
Linking domain authority
When the websites that mentioned you gain popularity, your website gets popularity as well when it comes to google. This happens as the Google Search algorithm detects an authority boost and so your website is more SEO-centric.
Link relevancy
The search engines have got parameters to judge whether the backlink given is of any relevance to your website. Suppose your website does contain hand-crafted jewelry but it has a backlink of a chocolate company, this will not be a relevant link and so this will be rated badly by the search engines. But if there is relevance in the link and the website then this backlink will get a good rating and has a better chance to appear in the top search results.
The importance of link building
The foundation of SEO is keyword research, acquiring backlinks, and having an on-page optimization. All of these are important when you want your content to be Search Engine optimized and not without one can you do. But when it comes to acquiring backlinks or links for the matter, it definitely has more value when building a popular search result.
