When it comes to SEO and building an online presence for your business, link building is essential. You might hear us talking about “backlinks” all the time, but what exactly are backlinks?
Backlinks are links that go from one website, to a page on another website, for example, a link on an external website that links directly to yours. These links are vital because they tell search engines that your website matters.
Search engines like Google consider these links “votes” for a particular page and therefore pages with a high number of backlinks tend to rank higher on the search engines.
Earning and giving backlinks
There are several “types” of links considered when earning or giving a backlink for SEO purposes. One of the main types is “natural backlinks”
Natural links have the strongest impact on boosting your site rankings because they’re completely “white hat”. As the name suggests, these links happen naturally with little effort and focus on the quality of your content that is deemed worthy of sharing between different online communities. It’s one of the “safest” types of backlinking and you can be assured that your website is safe from Google penalties.
You want to make it simple for other users to share, and create content that is engaging, enjoyable and useful. One way of doing this is by creating infographics. Infographics are images that condense all the information on your blog into a single image, making it not only super informative but visually appealing too. It’s something that can be multi-purpose too and used on a variety of different platforms including social media.
Alternative types include manual and self-created backlinks. Manually created backlinks are where you would reach out to a business to gain a backlink. I.e., if we, White Digital, reached out to a client for a link to a page that we created, we can then use that link on our own website and this creates a backlink. A self-created backlink is just as its name suggests, a link that has been created by the site owner themselves to make their website look more relevant and fool search engines so that they rank higher. This can result in penalties from search engines and is classified as “black hat SEO”.
Why is link building so important for SEO?
Our SEO process is built to bring you results, building you the most successful online presence possible for your business. Our process wouldn’t be complete however, without backlinks.
In a recent Google Q&A, it was revealed that backlinks are still the #1 most important ranking factor. They are vital to the SEO process as going from one site to another essentially represents a “vote of confidence” for your own website, which in return ranks you higher by search engines like Google.
Getting backlinks shouldn’t be a numbers game though, as often those with a lower number of backlinks perform better over someone with an extreme number. This is generally due to the way that someone builds their links, and if they follow “white hat” SEO rules, using the quality of their content to build their links naturally over the quantity of backlinks that they’ve built by paid links. Google considers many different factors when ranking your website including:
- How much traffic the referring website and page receives
- The relevance of the website and the page to your website
- The location of the referring website (i.e if you’re both in the same country)
- The text and content that is used to link to your website or page
- If the link is natural or paid for
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