What exactly are backlinks, are why are they deemed so important?

Introduction

It’s rare if any business can sit through a meeting with their SEO agency, and not hear the word “backlinks” been mentioned at least once.

Backlinks are an important part of the seo process, and often all that differentiates the businesses at the top in hyper competitive business sectors, are you guessed it, backlinks.

What exactly are backlinks?

Say you are looking to purchase a holiday, and you’ve booked your destination, yet you also wish to hire a car as well.

So the website where you booked your holiday has a highlighted text, that simply reads “hire cars”- so when you click that you are taken to another website- that is in essence a backlink.

Yet backlinks take on a different meaning for us SEO agencies, that’s to say they are way of informing Google’s algorithm that your website is important, that’s of course if the seo is implemented correctly.

Used to decipher how important your businesses website is

Imagine just for a second you have two separate businesses, and both are seo news websites.

Now one websites doesn’t have any other websites linking to it, yet the other, well that has thousands of backlinks, are the backlinks are from trusted businesses, the sorts of businesses that have an instantly recognisable brand- so which website would you trust to obtain your seo news from?

Well, the latter of course, and Google’s algorithm works in a similar way. Yet, as you learn as you continue to read this article, not all backlinks are equal, some will help to improve your businesses seo, and some can damage your companies seo.

 

Make your website a resource

Here’s our very best piece of advice that we would like you to take-away with you, that is so many digital marketing agencies spend hours, days, months and also years trying to obtain backlinks.

This often involves e-mailing, phoning and meeting with businesses to try and get quality backlinks.

But here’s our best bit of advice, start with optimising your website first, make it the best resource for information that you can.

So for example, say you run a solicitors practice, and you specialise in the area of divorce, we believe you should aim to offer the best advice that you can.

You may be thinking, where’s the incentive in giving information away for free? Well, by answering the questions that people often have when embarking on the divorce process you will be helping people find answers to a question they have.

And once your website is seen as an authority, a place where many people go to for advice is likely you will accumulate backlinks.

These backlinks if of a high-quality can help to improve where your website ranks, so giving away free advice can in turn help to improve where your business is ranked, therefore helping your business to improve its seo.

Quality is a must

Quality is an absolute must, as not all backlinks are worth the same. Some backlinks, which are from a high-quality source can help to improve where your business ranks.

Yet, with that said if your website was to accumulate links that are not from high-quality websites, well this can actually damage a websites seo.

Poor quality backlinks are lead to a link penalty. For example, Google’s Penguin update can penalise a website if it has rubbish backlinks.

 

Must be relevant

The backlinks should be relevant to your business, so for example, if you run a dental practice there’s not much point in obtaining a backlink from your local golf club.

Anchor text

It’s important that your online marketing agency optimise your businesses anchor text in a white hat way.

Many businesses have been hit by the Google Penguin update, and this sometime occurred because the business in question over optimised their anchor text.

Over optimising the anchor text is a really poor form of seo, and this can occur when the business keeps repeating terms within the anchor text that they wish the business to rank for.

So for example, say you run a construction business, you may keep placing “builders + name of city” within the anchor text.

Google Penguin

The Google Penguin update was an update that Google rolled out to penalise websites that had low quality links.

Sometimes some marketing agencies refer to these backlinks as spam.

How do you earn backlinks?

We think that the best way a business can earn backlinks is via an organic method, this means your website should have such good quality information, that other businesses and websites want to link to you.

For example, say your business retails bathroom items, such as showers, baths and bathroom suites.

If you were to offer really good, top quality advice relating on to fit these items, then such work is likely to obtain backlinks.

That’s to DIY websites, and websites to do with home refurbishment are likely to want to link to the work, or mention the business in a blog post.

Manual

The other way to build backlinks is the manual way, yet this is really dependent on the skill set of the marketing agency.

That’s to say some marketing agencies have brilliant link builders, yet some other agencies may not build backlinks correctly, which of course could result in the business incurring a penalty.

Can our SEO agency help?

Does your business require help to build its backlinks? If so, why not give us a ring?