If you have read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you have come across the term “backlink” at least once. For those who are new, you may be wondering what a backlink is, & why it is important to SEO. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that it is the foundation of any good SEO strategy. In this article I’ll explain what a backlinks are, why they’re important & what you can do to gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with search engines.
What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are links that are pointing to your website. Sometimes called inbound links (IBL’s). The amount of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of your site. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good amount of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their search engine results pages (SERP) when someone searches for your keyword.
When search engines calculate the relevance of a site for a keyword, they consider the amount of QUALITY inbound links to this site. So we shouldn’t be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, because the quality of the inbound link really does matter.
A search engine considers the content of those sites and determines the quality of the link. When there are inbound links to your site from other sites, and those sites have content relevant to your site, these inbound links are considered more appropriate for your site. If the inbound links are on sites with totally unrelated content, they’re considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of incoming links, the better is its quality.
For example, if a webmaster has a website on how to rescue orphaned kittens, and it received a backlink from another website about kittens, it would be considered more relevant in a search engine quality score than say a link from a site about boating. The greater the relevance of the content linking back to your site, the greater the quality of the backlink.
Search engines like web sites having a level playing field, so they look for natural links built slowly over time. Although it’s fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it’s much harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason that backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine algorithm. Recently, however, the search criteria for the quality of incoming links received has become even more difficult, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to manipulate inbound linking by by deceptive or sneaky methods, such as hidden links, or automated pages whose only purpose is to provide incoming links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they’re not only ignored by search engines, but if your site is linked to one it could get your site banned or deindexed.
Many marketers have multiple websites. These websites are sometimes related, sometimes not. You must be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP address. If you own 5 related sites, a link to each of these websites on a single page can hurt you because it may appear to the search engine that you’re trying to manipulate them. Too many links to sites with the same IP address is considered backlink bombing and is frowned upon.
The interconnection of these sites do not help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you might want to link your sites in the first place might be to give your visitors extra resources to on the subject. In this case, it’d probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another site, but try to avoid numerous instances of linking within the same IP address. A couple of links on a page now and again will probably not hurt you but only if those links provide value to your visitors.
Building quality backlinks is extremely important to SEO, and because of their importance, it should be very high on the priority list in your search engine optimization efforts. I hope you now have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site.
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