Everyone wants their blog or website to come up as fast as possible in search engines today. That is why many are taking the time to learn about SEO and how to make it work for them. If you find yourself in the same boat, you have probably seen the term backlinks quite a few times in your studies. However, you may be wondering exactly what that means and the importance of external links.
First, you have to understand exactly what backlinks are. Basically, this is a link from another website directed to yours. These can also be called inbound links and how many you have can determine the popularity of the website. An easy way to understand it is to imagine that each link to your website is a vote by a search engine. The more websites that link to you, the more votes you get in a search engine. And, if these are quality links, then the website gets to go up a rung higher in rank.
Two different kinds of links are considered backlinks. You have the on-way inbound link and the reciprocal inbound link. Quality matters and that is why the one-way links are usually considered quality and have the potential to give you better votes. A one-way backlink is where a site links to your site, without any prompting from you and has no link on your site. So simply put, websites direct a link to your site but you do not direct a link back to them.
The reciprocal backlink is the second type and is not that popular. These do not get votes or very few votes because search engines just do not care about these site, although in years past they did. This type of link is where a website directs a link to your site and you return the favor by then directing a link to their site. This may be a good way to get noticed at first, but it is not a recommended practice if you want votes.
What does “quality” links mean though? For a link to be considered “quality”, thus getting you a vote, it must meet a certain criteria. The website that is linking to yours must use the keyword that is optimized to your website. The website must also be the same theme as yours. What that means is that the content from the linking website must be related to the content on your website to count as a vote. If the backlink comes from a website that is totally unrelated to your content, then there is no quality to the link, thus no vote.
It can take some time to build up quality one-way backlinks to your site, but it is the best way to get ranked higher in search engines. To attract those links you need to keep your site filled with unique, quality content that is updated regularly. The more interesting a website, the more other bloggers or webmasters visit. Then, when you post something they like, they then direct traffic to you by linking to it.
The reasons these links are an important part of the SEO process is because your website stands a higher chance of being added to search engines faster. Then, the more inbound links that build up, the higher the ranking you get in the search engines, which in turn makes the site more visible. The more visible the site is in the search engine results, the more traffic you can pull in.
Many companies rely heavily upon article marketing for their inbound link building. Some of those businesses perform the task in house if they employ article marketing experts. Others use a service that will do the necessary research and build high quality deep links to internal pages.
It can be time consuming and you need to put a lot of effort and sometimes money into it, but backlinking is necessary today. A site that is visible and comes up quickly during searches has a lot of inbound links connected to it. Understanding the importance of backlinks can help you make your site as successful as you want it.
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