Few elements hold as much influence over a website’s search ranking as its backlink portfolio. Google, Bing, Yahoo and even some of the lower-tiered search engines all use backlinks to determine where and how to rank websites in their respective index. If you’re a newcomer to the world of search engine optimization (SEO), though, you may feel a bit lost when it comes to backlinks.
Backlinks: the Basics
A backlink is essentially an incoming hyperlink that, when clicked, sends the visitor to a different webpage. Backlinks can send users to another page on the same website, or they can users to another site altogether. Regardless, the fundamental characteristic of a backlink is that it sends users to a new page.
The SEO Power of Backlinks
Ever since the dawn of the Internet, search engines have relied on backlinks to improve their search results. If a particular website has hundreds or even thousands of high-quality backlinks from relevant sources, search engines will view that website as being an authority figure, at which point it’s more likely to achieve a top search ranking for its target keywords. On the other hand, if a website has a few-to-no backlinks, it may be viewed as irrelevant in the eyes of the search engines, resulting in a lower ranking. Google’s PageRank metric is even based upon both the quality and quantity of backlinks that a website has.
Because search engines like Google use backlinks as a ranking signal, you can encourage higher search rankings by focusing at least some of your efforts on building a strong backlink portfolio.
Things to Consider When Building Backlinks for SEO
- Relevancy. Is the site/page relevant to your own website?
- Number of outbound links. How many outbound links does the site/page contain? Ideally, you should obtain backlinks from sources with the fewest number of outbound links as possible.
- Nofollow vs dofollow. Links with the nofollow attribute do not pass link juice, making them less effective for SEO purposes.
- Age of domain. Older domains yield greater SEO value than new domains.
Where to Build Backlinks
Now for the million-dollar question: where can I build backlinks for my website? Unfortunately, many webmasters take the wrong approach by purchasing their backlinks. Google has said that paid links are against its Webmaster Guidelines, and therefore doing so may trigger a penalty. Unless you’re willing to take that risk (hint: you shouldn’t), avoid paying for links and instead let them come naturally. By creating exceptional quality content, other users will want to link back to your site. The bottom line is that you should focus on producing content first and then let the backlinks come naturally.
