Have you ever seen those commercials on TV about working from home building websites and doing SEO? This post will help to guide you through the basics of SEO and backlinks.
If you’re building a website or studying about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ve probably encountered or heard the term “backlink” at least once. Well, if you’re new in the online industry, you may be wondering what that word means and why it’s important in the world of SEO. Read on to find about the meaning of that powerful word.
What exactly are backlinks?
Backlinks are the relationship or connection amongst pages on the internet. They are links from a webpage that go back to your own site or other website. When you read an online post with a link to other webpage, like this one, you’re seeing a backlink. Also sometimes called as inbound links or IBLs, backlinks are considered a very important element in SEO. They are an indicator of the popularity and importance of a website. Generally, the more good quality backlinks the website has, the more the search engines, like Google and Yahoo, consider the site as relevant.
How important are backlinks?
As mentioned, search engines determine the importance of a site by having good quality backlinks. When search engines consider your site as relevant, you’re more likely to become visible at search results.
In addition, when another page or website is linking to your own page, it helps your page get easily found by your targeted readers. Just imagine if there are hundreds of websites that have links pointing toward your webpage! The more links, the more traffic your site will receive.
But of course, keep in mind that not all backlinks are useful in helping you improve your site’s ranking. There are some backlinks that don’t improve your ranking at all and worse, even provide negative effects to your site. These are links that don’t actually have anything to do about your site, or simply irrelevant. For instance, if you have a website about food, and you have a backlink from another site that talks about technology, then that link will be considered by search engines as irrelevant. But if your website is about food and you receive backlink from another related website, then that will help you improve your site’s visibility. So it’s also very important to use backlinks properly. Only consider the ones which have relevance to what you’re promoting. Generally, the more relevant the backlink content, the better.
How to get backlinks?
There are many ways for you to get backlinks. One way is to fill your site with useful and very informative content. When other website owners discover your site and get something useful, they will likely to put some links on their website that go back to your post or site.
Another way is by guest posting. Here, you write articles for other people and post them on their site with links that point toward your site.
And the third one is by using backlink software, such as backlink WordPress plugin. Backlinks software tools provide much easier yet powerful link management features that could help you create high quality backlinks and improve your site ranking.