What are Backlinks and Why are they Important for Website?
As we all know Link building is extremely important for SEO. Quality content is a vital step. But it’s only the primary step. Instead, you’ve got to actively build links to your site employing a mixture of content promotion and link building. Today, we’ll concentrate on what backlinks are, why they’re important, how you’ll be able to check them free, and the way to urge more backlinks to your site.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another. From the receiving end, these are often mentioned as incoming links or inbound links and from the linking side, they’re called external, outgoing, or outbound links.
There are three reasons why backlinks important?
- It’s a factor that helps Google and other search engines determine which page should rank the very best for a given query.
- Links to your website can send you more visitors through referral traffic.
- Backlinks can help search engines discover your pages faster.
Now, the simplest thing to conceptualize backlinks is to think about them as votes. When a webpage receives a backlink, it’s essentially another website vouching for the content on that webpage. Therefore, the more “votes” you get from credible sources, the more trust search engines will have on your website. But not all backlinks are created equal. At a basic level, two things separate “good quality backlinks” from the not so great ones.
- Topical relevance: Google talks about this in their “reasonable surfer” model which explains how the likeliness of a link being clicked relates to its importance.
- Authority: Authority is related to the standard and quantity of backlinks from the referring websites and pages.
Google places a score on this called “PageRank“. But since these numbers aren’t publicly available, third-party tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs use their proprietary metrics like Domain Rating, which represents the strength of a website’s link popularity, and URL rating, which represents the strength of a page’s link popularity. To put this into perspective, let’s say that your article got a link from the Site ‘A’. This website is very authoritative with a Domain Rating of 92. And in the same instance, it got another link from a lesser-known Site ‘B’, which features a Domain Rating of 17.
Based on the definition of Domain Rating (DR), it’s fair to mention that Site ‘A’ could be a more “authoritative” domain. Assuming topical relevance and everything else was equal, a link from Site ‘A’ would hold more weight than site ‘B’. But let’s throw a bit twist in here. Let’s say that the page from the Domain Rating 17 site linking to you had collected many links from reputable sources, while the article from Site ‘A’ had only collected some or even zero backlinks.Then the page-level authority of the positioning ‘B’ page measured by third-party tools URL rating score, would likely be higher, potentially giving it a grip over the location ‘A’ link. So as you are looking to get backlinks, you’d ideally want to get them from both topically relevant and authoritative pages to reap maximum benefits.
So how are you able to check backlinks to your own site?
There are two ways you can do that for free.
- Google Search Console: If you haven’t already created an account, just undergo the verification process to prove that you own the website. Then visit the Links report. Here, you’ll see your top pages which have the highest external links, the external websites that have linked to your site and the link texts that are most often used. (Also known as Anchor text)
- Use Third-Party Backlink Checker Tools: You can use third-party tools for actionable and insightful backlink data. To check what number a certain site has you can use paid tools like ahrefs.com and SEMRush. Put in a URL and they’ll spit out the highest 100 backlinks pointing at your target.
A free version of this is Link Explorer. With tools like Link Explorer, you can uncover valuable prospects, create a solid strategy, and track your progress. This brings us to the ultimate part:
How does one get backlinks?
There are 3 methods to getting backlinks.
- Earn Them – Earning links refers to natural organic growth. This can be when people discover your pages through any medium like Google search, social media, or word of mouth, and prefer to link to your page.
- Create Them – Creating backlinks is after you add a link on another website that points to your site. This may be through forums, directories, blog comments, or another method.
- Building Links – This is often usually done through strategies collectively referred to as link building. You’ll build links by reaching out to other site owners, editors, or webmasters and ask them to link to your page.
Because of their importance, backlinks should be a high priority in your Search Engine Optimization strategies. Hopefully, you now understand why your website requires high-quality links and how to earn them using the techniques provided.
