Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key skill and strategy for growing your online reach and attracting customers and is why backlinks matter. The game is always changing, as algorithms evolve to provide better results to those searching for a particular term, phrase, product, or anything else you dream up.
Comprehensive SEO involves a wide variety of strategies designed to help your company strengthen its internet presence. One of the lesser understood components of SEO is the creation of backlinks connecting your site to other relevant and credible sites.
What is a Backlink?
A backlink is any link from one site to another. When a site links to you, that’s incoming. When you link to another site, that’s outgoing. Backlinks are the connections that tie parts of the internet together, showing search engines where content is related and which sites are seen as a stronger, more credible authority.
Think of backlinks as votes, where the winner ranks highest in a search engine results page (SERP). The more credible backlinks (votes) for your website, the better your results. You want authoritative websites to link back to you, but you also want to create links to credible and relevant websites as well.
Why Backlinks Matter
Backlink strategy can be confusing and overwhelming, and if you’re just getting started, you may feel completely lost. Why should you bother getting other sites to link to you? Can’t you just focus on content and a good looking website? Backlinks are one of the most heavily weighted metrics used by Google and other search engines to establish rankings, index websites, drive traffic, and build a reputation.
- Organic Ranking: as mentioned above, backlinks are like votes — the more your website gets, the higher you’ll rank in SERP. This is a high-quality area of SEO which you can improve without paid advertising to increase your reach. Backlinko studied Google results and found that backlinks are the most effective way to meaningfully impact your SERP results organic ranking.
- Google Crawl: Google “crawls” the internet by reading and indexing every page it can find. When a backlink is created, it sends the crawler to that website for indexing. Therefore the more you have and create, the more frequently your site will be crawled and indexed.
- Better Traffic: It’s not just about ranking. Backlinks also bring more qualified traffic to your site. If a relevant site is talking about you, then interested customers will find their way to your page.
- Credibility: if your site doesn’t have any backlinks, it doesn’t look serious or credible. But if you can show many sites are connecting to you, it displays trust and credibility from other sources.
Quality vs. Quantity
The age-old debate of quality vs. quantity definitely applies to backlinks. Should you have more or just better ones? The answer, of course, is that ideally, you’d have both. Quality links are more heavily weighted, but they’re much harder to get—especially if you’re brand new or in a very saturated industry. Quantity links also count as “votes” so it’s important to get a lot, but it’s always a danger of being linked to spammy sites and blacklisted. Be careful.
Begin Backlinks with Revity
You need backlinks, but you don’t know where to start. That’s where Revity comes in. We can help establish your company as a credible authority and begin building links that help create your foundation on the internet. See what we can do for you.
