People with little to no SEO experience probably have a good idea as to what role keywords play in search engine optimization, but not much knowledge as to what backlinks are or how they work. Backlinks used to have much more functional significance than they do now, but they still play an important role in determining who’s looking at your web page and play a determining part in search algorithms’ determination of page relevance and thelike. Here, we’ll go over exactly what backlinks are, how they work, and how to get them.
What are backlinks?
The name ‘backlink’ is pretty self-explanatory: They’re links that direct users back to your website. That’s really all there is to them. They’re also sometimes called IBl’s, or inbound links. The number of backlinks to your website is a good indicator as to its popularity, which is why they play such a relevant role in search engine optimization. Search engines, and Google in particular, place quite a bit of emphasis on the number of quality backlinks a page has. The key word here is quality – buying a page to a unvisited site full of hyperlinks to the various pages a site has up doesn’t count.
How is Quality Determined?
‘Quality’ is not as subjective a measure as you might think. Quality is determined by a search of the site that hosted your backlink. The more relevant the site is to the link to yours, the higher the quality. Some webmasters try to post backlinks to their websites in the comments section of blogs, but since the blogs are rarely relevant to the back linked page, these don’t count for much. If, on the other hand, an established site like Wired has an advertised link to your tech website, the quality will be rated as significantly higher, and your web page will generate better search results.
How Do I Get Backlinks?
The easiest way to get backlinks is to establish yourself within your content niche so as to expose yourself to webmasters of partner operations in the same niches. When it’s clear that your content is relevant and of high quality, they’ll link to you more and more frequently, leading to better and better search ratings. The tactics of posting links to one’s own site rarely works out, even if the links are on relevant sites, so it’s better to do it through honest distribution of content.
