Why Backlinks Are So Important
I guess we all know by now that if we don’t have enough backlinks then we ain’t gonna feel the Google love! You can have the best website, with the best on-page optimisation, but if you don’t have enough backlinks then your seo experience is unfortunately over before it’s even begun. If you want to be better than the competition, you have to analyse them and see where their backlinks are coming from, and then set backlinks from the same or similar websites, but get even more of them, and make sure the search engines find them.
There is often some confusion surrounding backlinks and linkbuilding. There are, generally speaking, two kinds of links, backlinks and reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are like a two way street, traffic, in this case internet traffic can flow both ways down the street, and these kind of links between your website and another arn’t great for your SERP’s. A backlink, or one-way link on the other hand only points from another website to your website, it’s a one-way street with the traffic only flowing in one direction, towards your site. Backlinks are the backbone of any credible seo campaign and your website needs them!
Another factor to bear in mind is that some types of backlinks are more important than others. Yes, you need to get as many of these links pointing to your site as possible, but the better the quality, the fewer you will need. It is calculated that a .gov or .edu domain carries at least as much weight as 10 regular links, so the more backlinks your website receives from educational and government websites, the easier it is going to rank for your selected keywords. Page Rank (PR) also plays a large role, the more links pointing to a website or page, the higher it’s PR, the higher the PR from the origionating website, the better the perceived quality of the backlink.
Relevance is another important attribute of backlinks to consider. If they are from the same type of websites to your own then there is a good chance that Google with consider them relevant, if not then they will carry much less weight. Consider this next time you ask for or pay for a backlink, if you operate an Elvis Presley website then you will love to have a backlink from the official Graceland website, but would you want a backlink from a teeth whitening website? I think not, keep your backlinks relevant and your website will reap the rewards of higher search engine rankings, ignore and your site will suffer…..
To sum up, make sure your on-site seo is as good as it can be, then concentrate on getting backlinks from quality, relevant sources, and the only possible way is upwards as the search engine powers that be should reward your website handsomely.