Are Backlinks Important For SEO?
I can’t promise your blog the first position, but the first page is guaranteed.
As a web developer, I’m not new to the world of websites. Whenever I design websites, like any other developer, my main focus is on speed optimization and mobile responsiveness. As long as a website is fast and responsive that’s it for me.
But that’s not where it ends. The success of a website is determined by so many factors but SEO stands out for most sites if not all.
Backlinks are important for SEO. I have researched the topic from the most popular websites but most don’t seem to really understand what backlinks really do.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are simply links that link back to your blog or website. If I write an article on my blog and refer to an article from your blog, then you get one backlink from my website.
The concept behind backlinks is really simple but many digital marketing gurus and self-proclaimed SEO champs will try to make it sound hard just so they can get people to pay for their services and memberships.
Why Backlinks are Important.
Before I tell you why backlinks are important, I’ll start with the basics and build up from there for better understanding.
To get information from the internet, you use a search engine like google. Take the example of a library management system. When you go to the library and ask for a specific book, the library’s catalog helps you get the book without going through all their collections.
Google works in a similar way. The catalogs the information on the internet, indexes them, and ranks them based on relevance to their respective keywords.
To achieve this, Google uses bots. From my personal experience building web crawling bots, they don’t just crawl everything. They follow links from one website to another and this is where link building comes in.
Google’s index is built by a web of websites that link to each other and thus creating a massive network of websites. The links are ‘pathways’ that the google bots then follow when crawling and recrawling the sites.
If your site isn’t linking to other websites, then you’re not part of the network and thus your content doesn’t rank on Google’s search results. You can still submit your sitemaps or URLs though the search console for indexing and they will get indexed but still until you join ‘the network’, good luck even appearing on the tenth page.
How to build backlinks.
Now that you have a basic understanding of how backlinks work and why they are important, I have done some research on how to build backlinks. My way isn’t the highway and you should be free to explore some other ways too.
Most people will advise you to pay for backlinks from other sites, submit guest posts to other blogs, or just ask other bloggers to link to you. These link building strategies might work for you but they are cumbersome and might cost you so much time and money. You could end up discrediting your site to Google as the links built will appear unnatural or be of low quality.
How you should do it.
It takes time before Google or any other search engine fully understands what your site is about. Before attempting to get links just yet, work on the following;
- Relevance. If you have a niche website, ensure that your content is relevant to the niche. Otherwise, be sure to group your content into categories and use breadcrumbs and internal linking to avoid ‘orphan articles’.
- Complete Content. For every topic, exhaust every possible question the reader must have and write about then. If they are in two separate articles, be sure to link them together. This is quite simple but is vital for SEO.
- Internal linking and Breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are trails that not only guides the users but also google bots when crawling your pages. Using breadcrumbs and internal linking improves the overall structure of your site and makes it easier for Google bots to understand your pages.
- Optimize your posts and pages for SEO. If you use WordPress, I would recommend Rank Math plugin as it's free and has everything you need.
- Link to other websites. Try and link to other sites that focus on the same niche. I try to think of them as partners and not rivals. In most cases, they tend to visit and can land you free high-quality backlinks.
You might be wondering what this has to do with link building. When your site is complete and full of rich content, the links will come in naturally.
It takes time to build links this way but in the end, when it comes to monetizing your site, 1000 genuine subscribers are far more valuable compared to 50,000 cold visits.
