The Importance of Quality Backlinks
If you have been doing your research on how to promote your website in the search engines, you've probably encountered the term 'backlinks'. Several of our clients have been asking us exactly what backlinks are and why they are important. This short guide should make things a bit clearer.
What is a backlink?
Quite simply, a backlink is a link to your site from another site. They can also be referred to as inbound links or IBLs. Today backlinks are one of the main building blocks of good search engine optimisation as we will discover.
What does a backlink look like?
A simple instance of a backlink would look like this:
I just read a great article on web design work placements, check it out: http://noostyle.com/web-design-belfast-blog/83-how-to-get-a-web-design-work-experience-placement.html
Links like these are excellent and you are much more likely to get them from trusted sites if you have good quality, helpful articles on your website. You can also ask websites to link back to you. This will afford you the opportunity to ask for keywords to be anchored into your link. This method is much better if you are trying to rank well on Google for a certain search term.
For example, if we were trying to rank well regarding 'web design work placements in Belfast', we would ideally want to build backlinks which look like this:
I just read a great artcile on web design work placements, check it out: Tips to get you a web design work placement in Belfast.
Why are backlinks important?
Google and other search engines consider backlinks as references or testimonials. If you have backlinks from websites that the search engines trust, then they will trust your site also and you will rise in the search engine rankings.
The number of backlinks to your site gives Google an indication as to the importance of your website. If Google sees that your site has a good number of high quality backlinks, it will view your site as more relevant and rank you highly for the keywords contained in the link and in the web page it links to.
What is meant by high quality links?
We don't ask any old site for links. Links from poor quality sites such as spam sites, porn sites, rarely used sites and link farms will actually do us more harm than good. They could even get our sites banned from Google.
We need links from quality, authority sites which Google trusts. Think about this: If you were asked to be the keynote speaker on your industry topic at a conference, you wouldn't introduce yourself by saying how great you are and why people should trust you. That would be a huge turn off to the audience.
Instead, the compere introduces you, your skills, experience and relevancy. The audience accepts this as a testimonial and look forward to hearing what you have to say. Backlinks are exactly the same. The amount of backlinks, or testimonials, you have will help to establish your website as the keynote speaker in your industry. The higher the quality of the backlinks, the better.
How do I know if the backlinks are high quality?
Google employs a system called Page Rank or PR to asses the credibility of a web page, on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest. Therefore, a backlink from a site which is PR3 is much better than a site which id PR1. Use this handy Page Rank Checker to help you. If you browse with FireFox, consider adding the Live PageRank Extension.
How do I get more quality backlinks?
Remember the 'content is king' cliche? Well, never has a truer word been spoken. The more quality, and more importantly, unique content you have on your site, the more chance you have of getting backlinks. Would you link to a poor quality article from your site or would you be more likely to link to a useful article which is likely to help your readers or customers?
Consider starting a blog or news section on your website and make a point of writing an article once a week or once a month. Not only will this get you more backlinks, it will establish YOU, as well as your site, as an industry authority.
If you don't already have blogging technology on your site, speak to us and we'll help you out.
Conclusion
It is essential to build as many backlinks as you can to your website if you want to rank highly in the search engines. It is also prudent to acknowledge that Search Engine Optimisation is a process rather than an event. Therefore, you should make time to write articles and build links each month if you want your site to be successful.
Lots of our customers don't have time to do this so they employ us to do it. It doesn't matter who does it, just get it done. You can bet your bottom dollar you competitors are link building.
If you would like to know more about our link building services, feel free to get in touch. Our £79.00 package would consist of 150 hand made backlinks from our network of sites. All of your links would come from sites with a PR of between 4 and 8.
We also send you a report of each site linking to you, we ping each link to let Google know it's there plus we create an RSS feed of all your backlinks.
If you want to be found, get link building.
