What are backlinks?
A backlink is when one website links to another site. Good backlinks help raise your authority, therefore raising your rankings in the SERPs which gives you a higher chance of gaining more organic traffic.
A popular belief is if you have more backlinks, the higher your ranking will be in search engines because of the greater amount of traffic coming through your website. However, the quality of your backlinks is far more important than the quantity. It is much better to have several good, quality backlinks rather than a massive amount of low quality backlinks.
Types of backlinks
When a website links to yours, it passes along "link juice." Link juice helps with the ranking of your page while also increasing your domain authority. Domain authority is a metric used to rate your site against other websites on a scale of 100-1 (100 being best, 1 worst). The higher your domain authority, the higher your rank in the SERP's. However, there is an option to share or not share this link juice to sites you are linked to through:
- Follow Links
- No-Follow Links
Another important element of backlink is its quality level. The quality of each link is measured by the credibility of the site, which on our case is done by Majestic. Majestic categorizes each link's strength and quality into: High, Medium, and Low. The higher the quality of your links, the higher your ranking will be in the SERP's, which means more organic traffic and possible conversions.
Additionally, you want to make sure that your backlinks are relevant and contextual. For example, if you are selling women's swimsuits, you want links from webpages that are related to women's clothing, fashion blogs, and warm/summer vacation destinations rather than a food blog or an informational animal site, which both have no relevance or frame of context to your product.
Why are backlinks important?
Backlinks help with faster indexing, which means that the bots are able to find the links to your site faster and crawl to it smoothly. This means that backlinks help you improve your organic rankings in search engines, which leads to more traffic. Additionally, backlinks are a way to build relationships with other businesses and sites to improve and strengthen the credibility of your own.
How to get good quality backlinks?
Always practice White-Hat link-earning techniques and avoid Black-Hat link-earning schemes such as paying another site to make mention of yours. Some possible strategies to gain and increase good, high quality backlinks are through guest blogging, sponsoring or affiliating yourself with charities and other notable foundations, and building strong relationships with other companies and networks within your industry.