If you practice SEO on your website, you might already hear about the term “backlink”. It is an an important variable that can determine whether your SEO campaign will be successful or not.
But why is backlink important for SEO? First of all, let’s take a look a bit at the definition of a backlink itself.
What is a Backlink?
A backlink is a link that a website gets to one of its pages from another website. It is usually created when a website wants to refer to another website’s content for further explanation of its own content.
As it is a reference, that means the website owner who creates the backlink has some trust on the backlink target. After all, if you don’t feel confident about something, you won’t normally recommend it to other people, right? A backlink you create will make your content to become richer and provide a better experience to your content users.
There are several types of backlinks in its relation to SEO, such as dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, and UGC. From the four of them, dofollow backlinks are the most valuable in SEO although the other three can also add value.
5 Reasons Why Backlinks are Important in SEO
Now that you have read the brief description about backlinks, it is time to understand their importance, especially the dofollow ones. Here are the simple reasons why backlinks are crucial elements to improve our SEO results.
1. Google Says It is One of the Three Most Important Ranking Factors in Its Algorithm
According to what Google said in a Bloomberg article and its Q&A session, there are three most important Google ranking factors. They are backlinks, content, and RankBrain (an AI system employed by Google to better understand its user’s search intent). RankBrain is the third most important while the first and the second are between backlinks and content.
Now, if Google already said that, you should consider backlinks as a method to boost your SEO campaign. After all, Google is the one who operates the search engine you want to rank high at, right?
2. It Acts as a Vote of Confidence Towards Your Page Content
As described previously, backlinks are something that is normally given as some kind of vote of confidence. If a person links to your website page, this should mean that person trusts its content. Thus, the more backlinks your website page has, the more trustable its content should be.
And this seems to be the case for Google as well. According to Ahrefs, its UR scores (the score that assesses the backlink quantity and quality a website page has) correlate positively with Google rank positions. Therefore, it seems more quality backlinks towards your page should help it rank higher in people’s search
3. It Can Improve the Authority of Your Domain
The more trustable pages a domain has, the more trustable the domain should be too. This means your website should have more authority in what it talks about. Especially, if your backlinks come from relevant websites that operate in the same area as your website.
Google also said it looks at a website as a whole as well when determining its SERP. It seems if you want your website to become more prominent in SEO, you should consider having more quality backlinks
4. It Can Help You Get More Feedback to Improve Your Page Content
Backlinks can serve as a way for you to get visitors from sources other than search engines. This is true especially if you get your backlinks from highly popular and relevant websites.
The more visitors who come to your website means the more people will interact with your content. If you employ an analytics tool on your website, you should be able to get more data to analyze too. This can help you to know more about your content quality to further improve it in the future. Furthermore, you may get direct feedback from those extra visitors for your consideration as well.
Better content should help the visitors who come from search engines to have a better experience. This should help in making your website pages more likable by those search engines too
5. It Can Make You Know Your Prospective Audiences More and the Content They Probably Need
By using analytics tools, you should be able to know the websites which backlinks send you the most visitors. From there, you may understand what kind of website audiences are more interested in what your website offers. This can help you to further develop your website to better serve your prospective audiences.
You can develop your content based on keywords that suit the audiences or update your existing content to cater to them. This action should boost your SEO results as it potentially helps you to get more organic traffic as well.
Backlink Is an important factor to consider in SEO as the reasons above have illustrated. You should put in the effort to get quality backlinks for your website so its SEO results can further be optimized.
