Backlinks are the backbone of any website. A backlink is a simple way of one website acting as a source of trust for another website. Imagine meeting a stranger one day and not knowing whether to trust him or not? How will you make up your mind? Probably by asking your friends or trying to find a mutual entity that you trust. This is the role of a backlink in the world of websites.
Image by Parveender Lamba from Pixabay
A backlink is a link on one website that highlights another website, relevant to its content. This concept is more commonly known as "inbound link building" or "external link building". Search engines consider backlinks when rating a website in terms of trust and credibility.
So for example, if you wrote an article based on search engine optimization and a famous website quotes a part of your article and shares its link, search engine crawlers will take this as a sign of legitimacy and trust and will probably rank your article higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
Websites that have many high quality backlinks are more likely to be indexed quickly and preferred by search engines. However, it is important to note that when we're talking about backlinks, quality matters and not just quantity. If you're building backlinks just for the sake of spamming search engines, it will backfire and might even lead to blacklisting of your website.
The following paragraph shows how a backlink looks like:
"Search engine optimization is a crucial part of any websites growth. With the right SEO tools, you can easily rank higher on search engines."
The text that contains a link in the sentence above is a backlink for Semrush. The next time when Google will crawl this article, it will automatically take into account the link mentioned in this article and Semrush might gain some points based on this.
Even the links that you share on social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram can be backlinks for a website.
Importance of Backlinks
Backlinks are important for a number of reasons. As explained in the beginning of this post, a backlink is a backbone of a website. The more quality backlinks a website has, the stronger its backbone is. Some advantages, highlighting importance of backlinks, are as follows:
- Backlinks build search engine confidence and trust.
- Backlinks can boost your search engine rankings, helping to increase organic reach.
- Backlinks are a source of additional website traffic (which might increase revenue as well).
- Backlinks help search engines in discovering new platforms.
- If you have backlink on a famous website, your website can go viral.
- Backlinks help you compete with your competitors.
- Backlinks can create visibility of your website globally.
The importance of building good quality backlinks is way more than the few bullet points I've mentioned above. You can start by publishing high quality content on credible platforms like Medium and Quora, putting in a link of your website to get discovered. As your website becomes famous with time, you won't need to worry about backlinks anymore!
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