What are SEO backlinks – and why are they still important?

 Backlinks and link building are one of the most important factors for how your website ranks on Google. Find out what are the best ways to get backlinks to your website.

When you start learning SEO, there is a word that keeps coming up: "backlinks" or "link building". Why? Well, because they are still crucial to SEO and how you rank, especially on Google.

It is not easy to get backlinks, but the websites that have reliable inbound links from other websites have a better reputation with Google and this in turn makes them rank better.

In this post, you will learn what backlinks are, what they mean for SEO and how you can create backlinks for your website.

What is a backlink?

A backlink, as it is called in English, is a link that is on a domain and that leads to another domain. For the web page that links outward it is called an "outbound link" and for the web page that receives the link it is called an "incoming link".

A backlink is a link that exists on a website and leads to another website.

If you think about it, you can actually see the internet as a collection of a number of domains, websites and links. The fact that the internet is called "the web" or "the net" is actually due to the fact that it is made up of a number of pages that are linked together by means of links that form precisely a kind of "net".

A backlink is thus when a website links to another website. This is not the same when you have links that lead to other pages within the same website. Such links are instead called internal links .

Why are backlinks important for SEO?

Why are all webmasters and SEO experts crazy about backlinks and link building? What's the point of someone else linking to your website?

It all started in 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google's founder) introduced backlinks as one of the parameters in Google's ranking algorithm.

The importance of backlinks in Google's ranking algorithm

The idea was simple and it still applies today: Backlinks act as a signal that a page can be trusted, and a website that has more backlinks than others deserves to be ranked higher in Google's search results.

Things have of course changed since the early 2000s and nowadays it is no longer about numbers but rather about quality, so that websites that have more backlinks of higher quality rank better on the search pages.

Are backlinks still important?

The answer is given – yes backlinks still have a great importance for SEO. All studies done on SEO agree that the pages that have the most quality links are also the ones that end up at the top of Google searches.

Importance of link building for SEO

What do we mean when we say links with high or low quality? I'll get to this a bit further down, but first we need to understand how SEO works and where backlinks come into play.

A quick introduction to SEO

The main purpose of SEO is to optimize a website so that it is visible as much as possible in the various search engines, especially in Google.

To accomplish this, you must first ensure that search engine crawlers can easily access and index the pages of your website (this is called technical SEO ).

Next, you have to work on your pages (one at a time) and make sure that the search engines perceive them correctly in terms of page structure, page titles,  headings ,  meta descriptions  (this is called on-page SEO ).

In addition, you must optimize your content for both search engines and users (this is called seo texts ).

When you do all of this correctly and are consistent with it for a decent amount of time (at least a couple of months), you will notice that some of your pages will slowly begin to move closer to the first page of Google's search results.

This is a good start, but your organic traffic is still not very high because the majority of Google users click on one of the top five results when they search for something.

So if you don't end up in the first five for the keywords you have, the traffic won't be very high either.

So what can you do to make your site rank better and end up in one of the top five places so that you get more visitors? The answer is: backlinks.

Off-Page SEO and Backlinks

Off-Page SEO is what it's called when you promote your website online to get references (links) from other websites.

So why is this so important? Well, because when it comes to ranking, backlinks are one of the factors that the algorithms take into account to determine how popular a page is.

A website with many backlinks is perceived as more popular than the others and is therefore ranked higher.

Consider the following:

20 websites blog about exactly the same topics. The content they put out is of good quality, is fast, easy to use and offers the user a good experience.

Which of the pages will then appear at the top of the search results when someone enters a question that matches the page's search term?

This is exactly where backlinks come into play. The websites that have links from other relevant pages on the net are the ones that end up at the top of the search results and thus also get visitors to their site.

Backlinks make a website stronger and more popular

I've already mentioned a few times that while backlinks are important for SEO, it's definitely not about volume.

In other words, it's not about how many links you have, but where those links come from.

What is a good backlink?

A good backlink that can have a positive impact on your ranking is characterized by the following:

• It comes from a similar site to yours

• It is not tagged with nofollow (more on this below).

• It comes from a website that Google trusts and that has high domain authority.

• It comes from a high quality website.

What is a bad backlink?

A bad backlink is characterized by the following:

• You pay for it

• It is based on a link exchange

• It comes from a low quality website (eg a list of articles)

• It comes from a page that Google doesn't trust and has low domain authority.

• It comes from a website with little or no original content

• Its sole purpose is to manipulate the ranking in Google

A web page with many bad backlinks can actually risk punishment by Google, either for the whole website or for any individual page, and also lose its ranking in Google.

NOTE : Even though some of the recent changes in Google's algorithm are about automatically ignoring bad links, a website can still be penalized.

An introduction to link building

When Google started to grow bigger, it was clear to everyone who works with websites that they had to get high in the search results on Google if they were going to get any traffic to their site.

To rank high on Google, backlinks were needed and then people started looking for more ways to find links that pointed to one's website. This is what in the SEO world is called link building .

The situation soon got out of hand because Google's original ranking algorithm was so easy to manipulate.

This caused the quality of Google's search results to gradually deteriorate and it (that is, Google's quality team) decided that it had to take steps to protect its reputation.

One of the measures they took was to introduce dofollow and nofollow links.

 

Dofollow and nofollow links

All links are by default "follow links", i.e. "follow links". In practice, this means that the search bot that finds a link that leads to another domain follows this link and sees it as a sign of credibility from one domain to another.

This caused problems for ads that contained links, comments, and other types of links that were used for informational purposes only, and also for those links that pointed to content that might not always be trusted.

If you use an advertising platform on your website, such as adsense, you do not want the links in the ads to transfer page rank from your website to the advertiser. The same goes for links that appear in the comment field.

To solve this problem, the search engines have agreed to use nofollow tags for links.

This is a tag you can add to your links that tells search engines not to follow that particular link.

Another measure taken by Google to maintain the quality of its search results is to penalize those websites that try to manipulate their algorithms by buying links, participating in link exchanges, or completely bombarding the web with poor quality content (which they usually find in article listings). just to get a link that leads to their website.

Google penalized not only the websites that received the links but also the websites where the links were placed.

To learn more about Google's backlink penalties, read the following:

• Unnatural links from your website (by Google)

• Link schemes (by Google)

• Link-based penalties (Wikipedia)

It's important to keep in mind that Google can not only penalize a website for having lots of low-quality inbound links, but also for having lots of unnatural outbound links.

How to create backlinks

How do you then create backlinks on your website without risking Google penalties?

There are different ways you can do this, but we'll take a look at the most common methods for it.

Natural link building

This is the safest and most effective way to get those valuable backlinks. As the name suggests, it's about getting links from other websites in a natural way.

In other words, someone likes your website and your content and therefore simply has links leading to your pages.

This is not just something that happens in theory, it actually works for real and is also very effective, but to get there you need to make sure you have a good website with very high quality content that is worth linking to.

This is how Google imagines the web, as web pages that publish useful content and other web pages that link to them to show that they trust them. Google picks up on these signals and places such websites at the top of the search results.

The problem though is that you can have amazing content on your site but if no one knows you have it, no one will link to it either.

So what are you doing? Promote your page on social media to expose your page to the people who might be interested in linking to it. This means using social media to contact other bloggers, journalists and influencers and to let them know you exist.

This is not an easy thing to do just like that, but if you really want to build an online business that will succeed in sticking around for a long time, you need to connect with other people. It's exactly the same as marketing your brick-and-mortar business in the real world. In both cases, it is equally important to make the right contacts.

Look up bloggers / influencers

In addition to social media, you can also use email to connect with the right people for your link building.

The basic idea is the same as above, but here you use email instead of social media to connect with other bloggers and influencers in the industry to present your work and website.

It all happens as follows:

• Create extremely good content that is detailed and informative and that other websites are happy to link to.

• Make a list of websites/blogs that cover similar topics.

• Find the bloggers contact information

• Create tailored emails and contact the bloggers to let them know about your work and why they should link to your content.

It sounds simple in theory, but to make it all work you need to firstly make sure your content provides some value to the reader and is worth linking to, and secondly you need to write a personalized email mail and not some generic and stereotypical written message asking for links.

Link building using broken links

This is another way to get links. It is all based on the following:

• You use tools like SEMRUSH to find broken outbound links on other websites ie. such links that lead to a page that does not exist (404 page). This is completely normal and happens from time to time as many web pages may be down or the person who posted the link may have entered the wrong characters, etc.

• You send an e-mail to whoever owns the website and tell them that they have broken links on their pages and suggest that you can fix these links, perhaps by linking to your website instead.

• So you help them by telling them they have a broken link while offering to fix it. Most webmasters appreciate such a gesture and are more than happy to link to your website.

• The only problem with this method is that you have to spend a lot of time trying to find broken links that have something to do with your own content, and this is not always the easiest.

Guest post

Guest posting means that you write an article that you post on another website as a guest writer. In the body of the article or in the information about you, include a link to your website.

It all goes like this:

• You look up websites that are related to your niche and that accept posts from guest writers.

• You send them an email with a proposal (what article you'd like to write, why they should publish a post by you, etc.)

• In the article, you then add a link that leads to your website.

Guest posting is a great way to get more links, provided you publish your articles on high quality pages and the links are dofollow tagged .

Research your competitors' backlinks

When you get started with your link building, you will soon notice that it is difficult to find websites that agree to external linking.

One way to improve the possibilities is to go to the websites that you know already link out to other websites.

In other words, if a website is already linking to one of your competitors, there is a better chance that you too can get a link from them, provided you offer something good and approach them in the right way.

• The first thing you need to do is analyze the profiles of your top competitors (using SEMRUSH or any other link analysis tool) and find out which sites are linking to them.

• After that, you can look up the contact details of those who run the pages and send them a personal and customized email with your suggestions.

The above list is not complete. There are many more  methods of link building , but we can still state two things. First, link building is important for Google and rankings, and second, link building takes a lot of time and is one of the hardest parts of SEO.

Conclusion

Backlinks are important for SEO and for a website's growth and sustainability. Recent studies show that backlinks still play a crucial role in Google's ranking algorithm.

What you need to rank higher in the search results are high-quality backlinks from related websites. We used to always say that a link is a link , but that's no longer the case. You should choose the links that matter, not just any links.