What is the Importance of Backlinks for SEO

Some companies already use them without being conscious and others approach the positioning from a general approach that does not usually pay attention to them. The backlinks end up in one way or another being the great forgotten of SEO.

However, these redirect links are one of the main ingredients in the recipe mysterious algorithm Google. Web positioning largely depends on them.

What are backlinks?

The backlinks are nothing more than the other sites that have links to your site hosted. That is the number of links to pages on your domain that users can find by browsing on references.

These links determine the importance of your site with respect to others, and it gives Google very important information to classify the search results when users enter certain keywords.

As a result of premium link building, Google can determine how important your site is when compared to others, and classify search results accordingly.

The backlinks are one of the pillars of the positioning by the optimization, and yet tend to be underestimated. Why? Companies can invest thousands of euros in optimization, but they will hardly intercede in the creation of these links.

And, while one of the faces of SEO is actively operable, the other is not:

• Relevance : determined by the alignment of the content and the interest of the user who is searching. That is, the level of optimization of the web with respect to the rules imposed by the search engine.
• Authority : the level and quality of the reputation of the site on the Internet. How other pages see your website, and the trust they place in it.

At first glance, it is easy to understand why companies prefer to improve their use of keywords in the long term to work with quality content to increase their influence on the network.

Where does its importance come from?

At the end of the 90s, all kinds of search engines and companies dedicated to the digital market began to appear. More and more users were surfing the Internet, and the original engine system was becoming obsolete.

The logic said that if a certain phrase or keyword appeared on a site, then it would be redirected to a matching one regardless of the context or the usefulness of its content.

How do you get backlinks?

The technique to obtain these references is known as ” Link Building “, and it is one of the spaces most given to Black Hat SEO; unethical methods to improve rankings, which Google penalizes very seriously.

The Link Building becomes generating quality content for related pages. There is no direct path to achieving backlinks, and therefore the only alternative is to improve the image that is projected on others with the help of link building services from Getmentioned. It will not only take less time to implement your SEO strategies, but it will also take less time for them to take effect. 

If another site finds your information interesting, practical or reliable, then it will be more likely to refer to it with a link to your page. Of course, many more factors come into play in this process than simple linking.

The site that decides to include the external link can greatly influence its quality depending on the use made of the ” anchor text “, the ” follow / no follow ” and any other meta tag associated with the page.

Alternatives

Since you cannot influence the policies of other companies, ultimately the websites strive to align their content with the quality standards and the topics that interest associated pages.

• Guest Blogging : go as a guest signature to another page, to include your link at the end of the text provided. It is a method by which both parties win, one with quality content, and the other with a backlink.
• Notes of press : the same statement is itself a retroenlace in those digital media or blogs that manages to be published. It confers at the same time, a plus of authority normally technical or scientific.
• News or press articles : it is always advisable to maintain a good relationship with certain journalists, because they could later include links to your site in their publications.
• Social network profiles : by referencing your page, it is highly likely that other websites tend to use one of your profiles on social networks. These in turn redirect to the site and increase traffic. Of course, not all platforms allow Google indexing.

There are other techniques such as comments on blogs or reciprocal links that also serve to get backlinks, but the search engine tends to penalize them as unethical.

It was enough that they were the same for the search engine to create a link and that would improve the positioning of the referral. However, this was not long in leading many to try to pervert the mechanism.

Through the so-called “Keyword Stuffing”, companies created hundreds of artificial keywords to increase their traffic and thus generate more advertising revenue. And it worked until PageRank appeared.

The internet classification

In 1999 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, published a scientific article to explain the solution that would save search engines from disaster: “ PageRank ”.

The concept was the result of a logical assumption about backlinks: if many pages link to the same referral, it is because they probably contain useful and quality information.

Thus, a sort of ranking was established conditioned by the assessment that each website received based on the number of links that other pages had towards them.

The backlink of page A would be a vote for page B, and the more votes, the higher the reputation and position in the table.

Now, Google not only takes into account the number of links but also contextualizes where the vote comes from: a public reference – a Ministry, for example – is not worth the same as a personal blog of an anonymous user.

How do I know how many backlinks I have?

There are many programs and analytical tools that allow you to know the number of backlinks from your own site and from third parties. The most useful and easy to use, however, is Google Search Console.

Register for free if you have not done so yet, and once you are on the platform, look in the section column on the right for the ” Links ” space, and then select ” External links “.

Here you can see both the total number of backlinks to the website, as a top broken down by most referenced pages, and even internal links. Managing this information is critical to making consistent SEO decisions.

And how many links do you have to have? Each company finds its number by calibrating and learning from mistakes. There are mathematical models and algorithms of Artificial Intelligence that allow knowing the exact figure, but it is not essential to act appropriately.