Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Backlinks can boost your search page ranking and give your website authority and trustworthiness at the same time. But it is important to know the best practices for getting backlinks and ensuring they deliver the cred you want. Great content is key to visitors and Google happiness. But backlinks can give Google more reason to serve your site on the first page of their search results. Along with great content, Google and the gang needs to understand and trust your website. That means anything you can do to help search engines better understand your site structure and context is a top priority. That’s where links come into play. We’ve already discussed internal links, and in this article, you will learn why backlinks are important and should play a role in any successful SEO strategy.
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Real-World Experience
A friend of mine is very active in our local community. She has a retail store, and her e-commerce website helps drive awareness and sales. I recently asked her why the charities she supports don’t provide any backlinks to her site. Not only had she never asked her for the non-profits she supports for links, but she also needed to learn why they were useful. We met for coffee to discuss the importance of backlinks. She started calling her charities on the way back to her shop.
Why Backlinks are Important to Your Website and SEO
A backlink is a link on any site that links to your site. The link does not live on your website, and your visitors don’t see it. But when people visit a website with a backlink to your website, they see the link. The anchor text is often your company’s name or the title of some content on your website. When they click on it, they land on one of your website pages. For example, imagine you own a bar that specializes in craft cocktails. A local bartending school could include a link on their website to an article your website published called “10 New Twists on a Classic Old Fashioned.” The anchor text would be the title of your article and would deliver the reader to your webpage containing the article. The link would be a backlink for your website.
Backlinks are important for two reasons:
- Backlinks help people and search engines discover new content. That establishes value for your visitors. In the case of our example, visitors to the bartending school’s website not only discover new ways to make a classic cocktail, but they also discover your bar. That’s a great value to the website’s business. Back to our example, the bar’s website gets visitors who may never have known about your bar. And most importantly, they may visit your bar to sample the drinks themselves.
- Search Engines rely on links to discover new content. Once Google crawls the link, they will follow it to your site. If the link comes from a website with high domain authority, Google may crawl and index your content quicker than waiting for Google’s scheduled crawl of your website. Plus, Google interprets links from one site to another as a seal of approval. Therefore, if your backlink comes from a website with high domain authority, that cache will carry to your site, helping with your EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust).
Can Backlinks Boost Your Ranking?
Yes. A recent article published by Search Engine Journal quotes Google’s John Mueller, “By adhering to the best practices when optimizing outbound (back) links – you could be seeing an effect on your visibility and ranking.” Mueller also said on a recent Google Search Off the Record Podcast, “Links will always be something that we care about because we have to find pages somehow.”
Not All Backlinks are Created Equal
Getting backlinks for your website is important, but it can be time-consuming. So when investing time in backlinks, it’s important to get the right kind of link. There are two types, “Do-Follow” and “No-Follow.” The distinction is never visible to the user. Both do-follow and no-follow links behave in the same way. The visitor clicks the anchor text, and the link lands on the destination page. But for search engines, there is a big difference between do-follow and no-follow links. Google determines whether the backlink is a do-follow or no-follow link based on the HTML code that is attached to the link.
Do-follow links are the best for SEO. This type of link serves as an endorsement from the site containing the link to the destination site. Google considers this significant, especially if the website containing the link has high domain authority. For the destination site, the power of the link is commonly called “link juice.” The more powerful the website providing the link, the bigger the link juice. Do-follow backlinks are ranking factors for Google.
No-follow links, according to an article in Search Engine Journal, “indicate that the destination of that hyperlink should not be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g., search engines).” A no-follow link is not associated with the destination site, and for a long time, Google ignored these links. In a recent algorithm update, Google started using no-follow links for content discovery. They still have no link juice and are not considered a ranking factor.
Conclusion on How Backlinks Can Boost Your Ranking
Backlinks are an important part of any successful SEO strategy. They can provide critical authority and trustworthiness to your website. Therefore, backlinks can boost your rankings on search engine results pages. But the quality of the site providing the link and the type of link they provide are the critical factors for making search engines take notice. Getting backlinks for your website can be labor-intensive, so be sure you seek out backlinks from websites in your industry. These websites should come from industry organizations, larger firms with products complementary to your products, or media websites that provide resources to your industry.
Finally, if you get a backlink with lots of link juice, make sure it’s a do-follow link. Getting proper backlinks for your website can be challenging, but the payoff can be higher rankings, more traffic, and conversions. Sand Key Ventures offers SEO services that build stronger relationships between your website and search engines like Google. We use state-of-the-art SEO tools to ensure websites are technically sound and full of things to help Google understand both structure and context of your content. That makes Google smile. And when Google smiles on your website, you will smile too.
Sand Key Ventures is a website company that focuses on user experience. We create websites with compelling content and provide SEO services to keep websites running clean. For a FREE website audit and health score, call us at 727-249-2749. You can also send an email to michael@sandkeyventures.com. If you prefer to copy and paste the email link, it is michael@sandkeyventures.com.
Thanks for your time, but now we’ve gotta run. We have websites to build and audit, blogs to write, eCommerce to manage, and photos to edit. Until next time, take care.