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The Importance of Backlinks

Are you familiar with backlinks and the importance that they hold with Search Engine Optimization?

If you are new to SEO, you may be wondering what in the heck is a backlink and why do I even care?

Backlinks have become so important to Search Engine Optimization for offline businesses that they have become one of the building blocks  to building a successful e-commerce website. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why you need to have backlinks to your website and how you can start to get these without getting in trouble with the search engines!

What are “backlinks”?

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website from another website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query. This ultimately ranks your website higher.

When a search engine is calculating the relevance of a website in relation to a keyword, one of the things considered is the number of quality inbound links to that site. Therefore, you need to be careful when buying backlinks as some of these will not be relevant to your site, which just wastes your money and I don’t want that to happen to you (I’ve lost a lot of money learning this the hard way).

You need to have quality inbound links and these sites linking to yours need to have content that is related to your website, causing the search engines to recognize this and rank you higher.

Relevant backlinks

By having relevant backlinks to your website, google and the other search engines basically are giving you a high five for doing a good job, putting you towards the top of the search engines. If you only have irrelevant websites linking to yours, google could care less and won’t rank your site where you want it to be.

For example, if a person like you has a website about sewing, and you received a backlink from another website about sewing, then that would be more relevant in a search engine’s assessment than a link from a site about car racing or cooking. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

How Should I Go About Building Backlinks?

Search engines want to see websites building up natural links slowly over time and not just 50-100 in one or two days (this is what most people do when you hire them. This is “black hat marketing” and is frowned upon by the search engines so be careful).

While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is one of the reasons why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately the search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher to crack. Webmasters are getting smarter trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely. You do NOT want that to happen, do you?

Another important reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can’t build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without you pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site.

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