You must have heard about a term called backlink if you are a digital marketer or an entrepreneur trying to make your website work. If you are familiar with the term and wonder why are backlinks important in SEO then this blog can be helpful to you. We must understand the importance of backlinks for SEO before blindly creating them because poor-quality backlinks can harm our websites.
What is a backlink?
Backlink is a link that come from other website to your website. When someone inserts your website’s link on their web page, you get a backlink from it.
For example,
Suppose you have a website called Website X. You sell electronic machines like coffee machines and you frequently write blogs related to your niche. Another website called Website Y also puts up a blog post on the topic “Recipe to Make Capacnino at Home.” They want to add a link in their blog post to a web page that can educate their readers more about the topic and the related terms. They researched and found a blog post on your website related to “Prices of the Best Coffee Machines.” Website Y creates an external link on its web page to add a link to your post. As a result, your website X gets a backlink from website Y.
Why are Backlinks Important in SEO?
Backlinks are one of the most important factors of SEO because they help a website grow in many ways.
Following are the reasons why backlinks are considered important in SEO:
Backlinks Improve Ranking:
Backlinks play an essential role in SEO because they are the most important Google Ranking Factors. They are like recommendations a website puts on its content for its visitors to go through a webpage and learn more about a specific topic. They are like “votes of confidence” that one website gives to another website.
When a webpage gets a lot of backlinks from other websites, it signals search engines that the content of that webpage is high-quality, worth linking to, and credible. As a result, search engines start improving the ranking of that webpage for a relevant term on its SERP.
They do this to show the webpage people are vouching for to its other users. What is the ultimate goal of a search engine? It is to give the best result and satisfying user experience by providing them with a link to a web resource that is worth their time and answers their queries.
Therefore, backlinks are crucial to rank a web page at the top position on SERP.
Backlinks Drives Traffic:
When you get a backlink from a website, the likelihood of getting traffic increases. While exploring, the visitors of that website may click on the link that directs to your website to get more information about a topic. And as a result, you will get more traffic through a referral link.
Therefore, aim to get a backlink from a popular, well-established, authoritative website with massive traffic so that more people will click on the link and reach your website.
Backlinks Improve Visibility:
Search engine bots tend to recrawl popular, good-quality, high Da and PA websites more often than others. Backlinks from such websites improve your visibility to bots and make it easy for them to find you.
Backlinks Enhance Brand Awareness:
Backlinks also improve the brand awareness of a website. As I mentioned above, backlinks drive traffic to a website. This traffic means you have reached many of your target audience and made them aware of your brand. They will start acknowledging that there is one more website that offers great content, and they may visit you more often.
Backlinks Improve Domain Authority:
The other benefit of getting a backlink from a highly authoritative website with high DA and PA, it passes on its domain authority to the web page they link to. And, Domain Authority is one of the factors that convey the success of a site to Search Engines. The higher your domain authority is, the more likely you will earn top spots on SERPs.
What Types of Backlinks Can We Acquire?
Basically, we can categorize backlinks into three types on the basis of how we acquire them.
Naturally or Organically Acquired Backlinks:
Natural backlinks are the highest-quality backlinks that a website can get. These are the backlinks we get from other websites without direct or indirect involvement are called natural backlinks. They just randomly come in from other websites that found your content link-worthy. You get this link not because of your outreach efforts but as a way of acknowledging the value they are getting from your content. You can think of it as the process of earning organic endorsements from other websites referring to your content.
They are hugely beneficial even if you get a nofollow link because visitors of that website can still click on the links and explore your website if bots cannot. We should always long for natural backlinks.
However, it is challenging to get natural backlinks. They usually start coming in with time. They start coming in when a business gets some recognition and has earned some trust in its community. For example, a big name Amazon doesn’t ask people to talk about it or link back to it. Writers happily write about it and link to it because Amazon has earned that trust over time.
On the other hand, small businesses would not get this recognition at their early stage, and waiting for the recognization to happen on its own will never help. We will have to put a lot of time and effort into making our website or content reach a point to get the rewards called natural backlinks.
It is where the concept of manual or outreach link-building comes in.
Outreach Backlinks:
Outreach backlinks are backlinks we intentionally acquire for our website through a link outreach campaign. These backlinks are as beneficial as natural backlinks with a slight downside. Maybe because they do not come in organically, we work hard to get them.
For example,
- Guest Posting
- Link Roundups
- The Moving Man Method
- Broken Link Building
- Link Reclamation
Self-created or User-created Backlinks
Self-created backlinks, as the name suggests, are those backlinks that we create to promote our business. Other websites do not give these backlinks, we create them intentionally for our website. Google and many other search engines do not want to count on self-created backlinks. They often see them as low-quality backlinks because we are endorsing our business through these backlinks. And this is not what Google is looking for when finding deserving websites that deserve to rank top on SERP.
In the past, they were getting used in SEO, but you should use great caution in their implementation now. Google has been targeting these techniques over the years, and websites have been penalized for overdoing them.
In this process of intentionally acquiring backlinks, we must consider some factors that make a backlink more beneficial than other.
What are the Factors that Affect the Value of Backlinks?
All the backlinks do not carry the same value. One high-quality backlink is more beneficial than 100 low-quality backlinks. A high-quality backlink does not look different than any other backlinks, but there are a few factors that make a huge difference in their quality and the value it brings to a web page it is targeted to. We must understand all these factors to choose the right backlinking strategy and rank higher on SERPs. We need to be careful and aware in our link-building process.
Authority:
When an authoritative website links to you that have been in business for years, knows its job and has earned trust and authority, it indicates that your content is of supreme quality. They will never link to a poor-quality web page. They will link to your content only if it adds value to their readers. They will never link to low-quality content that will ruin their users’ experience.
Google puts a lot of weight on a backlink from an authoritative website. If you get such backlinks, the search engines will instantly boost the ranking of your web page.
Relevance:
Backlinks you get from a website or webpage that are relevant to your topic are hugely valuable.
For example,
Suppose I linked to a beauty or kitchenware-related web page in this blog post. Will you click on that link? No, right? Because your intent here is not to know about beauty or kitchenware or cooking recipes but to know anything and everything about backlinks. You would never appreciate a link to an irrelevant web page. Please note that only relevant traffic can help grow a website.
Anchor Text:
Anchor text is a hyperlinked text that carries the website’s URL.
The backlinks that have keyword-optimized anchor texts are the best to rank high on the SERP.
For example,
Suppose someone creates an external link on their fitness-related blog to a cycling-related topic. But instead of cycling, they use bodybuilding as an anchor text. Such backlinks are not valuable because the anchor text is irrelevant to the topic they are linking to. In addition, it would give a bad user experience to the people who would click on it.
However, over-used keyword-optimized anchor texts can also harm us. It can get our website penalized by search engines. Keyword-stuffed anchor texts look spammy to Google and other search engines, and they may think the webmasters are trying to manipulate them rather than offering relevant links to the web pages. Google’s algorithm, Penguin, filters out websites with backlinks that contain exact-match anchor text.
Hence, we must ensure that the keyword used in the anchor texts fits naturally rather than inappropriately using the exact keyword of the web resource as an anchor text.
Dofollow Backlinks:
There are two types of backlinks we get: dofollow and nofollow. Whether it comes from an authoritative website or not or has apt anchor text, you will get a dofollow or nofollow backlink, and that is for sure.
It is good to get dofollow backlinks because users can click on them and visit the page it links to, and bots can also crawl these links. Nofollow backlinks do not enhance the ranking as much as dofollow backlinks because search engines ignore links with nofollow tags. However, nofollow backlinks can still transfer some authority because they help to bring traffic to the web page.
So, prioritize acquiring dofollow backlinks to ensure your backlinking strategy works in your favor. We should not ignore nofollow backlinks though. 100% dofollow backlinks may signal search engines that we did not get those backlinks naturally and that they prefer natural backlinks. So the ideal ratio of nofollow and dofollow backlinks is 6:4. For 60 dofollow backlinks, we must have 40 nofollow backlinks.
Number of Backlinks:
As mentioned above, when a webpage gets a lot of backlinks, it conveys to search engines that the content of that webpage is high-quality and worth linking to. As a result, search engines start improving the ranking of that webpage for a relevant term on their SERP.
Position of Backlinks:
You may not believe that the position at which your backlinks are on a web page also plays an important role. A backlink coming from the main body of a web page will add more value than a backlink at the bottom.
Link Equity:
When you get a backlink from a web page that also links to many other web pages, the value of the share of such a backlink will be much less than a backlink referenced among fewer. It is called link equity.
The visitors to the web page are likely to skip your backlink placed among the hundred other backlinks; this devalues it.
So, it would be best to have a backlink from a web page with only a few or no other backlinks to share its link equity.
Diversity:
The value of a web page increases when it gets backlinks from different sources.
For example,
Suppose two websites have the same number of backlinks. But the number of websites that showed trust and linked to them is hugely different. Which website would searches give priority to?
They will prioritize and enhance the ranking of the website that has built an impact on a much larger number of websites.
Hence, it would be better to get ten links from ten different websites each time than one hundred links from the same website.
Final Thought:
I hope you got the clarity on the importance of backlinks for SEO. They are considered the secret sauce that boosts ranking on web pages for a reason. Please be very cautious while creating backlinks because they can be harmful in not created mindfully. Remember the above-mentioned points while creating backlinks and see your website rank higher on SERP and your business grow.
FAQ
What is a good number of backlinks?
A website should have 40 to 50 backlinks to the homepage and 0 to 100 backlinks to each web page. However, always check the PageRank scores of those backlinks because the higher their value, the fewer links would be required to enhence their ranking.
What is the ideal ratio for dofollow and nofollow backlinks?
We must have dofollow backlinks, but we should not ignore nofollow backlinks. 100% dofollow backlinks may signal search engines that we did not get those backlinks naturally and that they prefer natural backlinks. So the ideal ratio of nofollow and dofollow backlinks is 6:4. For 60 dofollow backlinks, we must have 40 nofollow backlinks.