SEO: What are backlinks?

Backlinks are links to your website from other websites.  (Not links that you put on your website to other sites.)  Backlinks are important because they help determine the relative popularity of your website.  The more quality links to you, the better.

I stress quality because there are many people out to try to exploit search engines, and one of the things they do is to seek out any kind of link they can get, whether or not the linking site has any relation to their own site. This is not a backlink strategy, this is “link spam,” and Google (particularly with their Penguin update) has been out to penalize this practice. After Penguin, some websites dropped from high positions in Google overnight.

Google’s current sophistication takes into account:

• How popular or authoritative the site is that’s linking to you.
• How relevant the site is that’s linking to you, i.e. are you in the same or related industries? Do you share the same target market?
• How relevant the words are that make up the link. The words that make up the link are called the “anchor text” and they should be words that are used on your own website.

If you’ve got highly authoritative and relevant websites linking to you, this will help improve your website’s value.  The higher your value potentially the higher up in search you will go.

How can you implement or improve a backlink strategy?

Here are 3 ways:

1. Find websites that are important in your industry

Try searching for your own keywords, and see what businesses/organizations/associations appear higher in the search rankings.  Is there a way for you to obtain a link on any of these websites back to yours? Try to do this but don’t get too obsessed with it. It often isn’t possible and, in any case, there are other things to do that are even more important. Such as…

2. Use social media

Are you aware that a link from one of your own social media profiles is a valuable backlink? (Most people don’t think of it this way.) So establish (and keep active) a Google+ page for your business, as well as other high ranking social media pages such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Pinterest and Instagram work really well for visual businesses.

3. Write interesting content on your website that people will want to share

When people link to a post on your website’s blog, that is a backlink. When someone with an “important” website links to a post on your blog, that is pure gold! People will link to content that is interesting, answers questions and solves problems.

New content on your website also helps your search engine ranking because Google loves “activity,” as opposed to stagnation, on a website. There is a theory that Google looks at the last 60 days of changes on your website to see how active you’ve been.  The more active the better. (I say it is a theory because much of what we know about how Google behaves is theory. Google doesn’t tell us straight out how they operate, but certain things, observed over a long period of time, can be surmised to be true.)

Backlinking is one piece of the SEO puzzle. The pieces need to all exist and fit together properly for success. For more information on how we might be able to help you improve your ranking in Google and other search engines, please get in touch.