Backlinks are like digital referrals on the internet. Essentially, they are links that connect from one website to another. So, how does this help in search engine optimization (SEO)?
What Are Backlinks and Why Do You Need Them?
Backlinks are links that click through to a target site. For example, if you create beautiful hats and a fashion website happens to refer to your hats in a story about summer clothing with some anchor text — which leads readers to your product site — this would be an external link outbound to your site. The fashion website would be known as the referring site. These kinds of naturally earned, authentic backlinks are important because of the way search engines rank pages. So, you need them to rank higher in search engines and become more reputable and, therefore, visible to browsing traffic. Internal backlinks are also known as links from page to page within your own website.
How Search Engines Rank the Importance of Your Web Pages
Essentially, the major search engines rank web pages so that the users of search engines have access to relevant and valuable information that aligns closely with their search. Imagine if you typed in ‘coffee near me’ in your browser but got lots of listings for fitness gear — the search engine wouldn’t be doing its job, would it? So, to disseminate relevant information to users at lightning speed, major search engines such as Google and Bing review your content to see if you meet their ranking criteria. It goes something like this:
- You publish a blog with catchy visuals and valuable information
- Search engines ‘crawl’ through your content using bots
- They index your content using different algorithms and factors
- They rank your website according to whether you meet certain criteria.
How do Google and Bing Find Backlinks?
Now that we’ve explored how search engines rank pages, it’s time to understand more about the importance of backlinks in this ranking process. Backlinks are one important aspect that search engine ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ will look out for. Backlinks are crucial to your domain authority because they are one of the key signifiers to Google and other search engines, indicating that your website and its content are of value and are a trusted source.
Backlinks are almost like a digital word-of-mouth system — if a high-authority website, for example, Microsoft, links to a piece of your content that is relevant to their users, that is a big tick of approval from your search engine. You become more of an authoritative site, your search ranking moves up, you become more easily discoverable to internet users, and you receive more traffic and potentially more conversions. That explains the importance of backlinks in SEO.
Next steps
Want to boost your domain authority with backlinks? Reach out to the backlink experts at Perfect Link Building, who can perform a backlink analysis of your website and create a bespoke backlink strategy for you.