Purpose and Importance of Backlinks with Respect to SEO
Monday, July 27th, 2009 Back Links, Blog, SEO by adminPurpose and Importance of Backlinks with Respect to SEO
You might have come across the term “Backlinks” and heard people discussing about it in many forums especially SEO related forums. What is a backlink? A backlink is nothing but an incoming link to a website i.e. link from other websites to your website or webpage. People call them as incoming links, inbound links, inward links, inlinks etc. It is a link directed towards a webpage, website or directory from another website or webpage or directory. Good quality backlinks can make your site popular since your sites attract more traffic. In this article, we will know about the significance of backlinks with respect to search engine optimization.
The main purpose of backlink is to pull traffic to the website. Search engines show importance to those sites that have good quality backlinks and these sites will be placed in higher positions in the search results compared to the sites that do not have quality backlinks. It is not just the number of links but the quality of these links matter a lot. Search engines compare the relevance of the site with respect to the keyword and look for quality backlinks before displaying the search result. The quality depends on the content, if the site from which you get a backlink matches with your content, then search engine treats it as good backlink. If links are present on unrelated sites, then your site might not have higher positioning in the search engine’s result. Backlinks from sites, which have similar content to your website, are considered as high quality backlinks.
The number of quality backlinks to your site is one of the most important factors, which decides the search -engine’s ranking for your website. Various techniques are employed by SEO (Search engine optimizers) to increase the number of backlinks to the website. Some methods are free and can be used by anyone but there are few methods such as link baiting which requires marketing and planning to work. You can find many companies online that deal with SEO and provide SEO solutions. Sarasota web Design Company located in Florida offers excellent SEO solutions.
Some controversial news that attracts people can be considered as link bait that happens naturally. People become extremely interested in a breaking news provided by a site and other sites link to this site. Search engine judge the relevancy of a backlink not just by comparing the keywords but also examining the anchor text. An anchor text contains the detailed description of hyperlink as it appears on the webpage. A search bot verifies the relevancy of the content on the webpage. These two factors –anchor text and content decide the SERP (search engine results page) ranking based on the keyword provided by the internet user.
Earlier, it was thought by many webmasters that the number of backlinks only matter in search engine results. However, the fact is that the quality of backlink is more prominence than number of backlinks. There are sites that have just 50 backlinks and they have higher ranking than sites that have more than 1000 backlinks. The reason is very simple, relevance of content matters more. For example, say you have a website that is related to cars and you have a backlink from a site that sells food items, then search engine treats it a bad quality backlink. Higher the relevance better will be the quality of backlinks.