Definition
Simply put, backlinks are links that are directed to your website from another website. Also called inbound or incoming links, they indicate the importance or popularity of your website, which determines your rankings in the search engines. Backlinks can be viewed as sort of a vote for the webpage they link to by the granting page. They not only improve your rankings, but they are instrumental in getting quality traffic and potential customers to your site.
Backlinks and SEO
Backlinks have become some of the main building blocks for successful search engine optimization (SEO). Some search engines, Google in particular, give more credit to websites with a higher number of quality backlinks, viewing them as more relevant compared to other similar websites. Building quality Google backlinks is one of THE most important factors in SEO as well as in driving traffic.
How to Get Backlinks to Your Site
• Write quality content on your site.
• Promote quality content on other sites.
• Support quality content via blog comments.
• Contribute to the Internet via articles, plugins, etc.
• Use descriptive anchor text that incorporates keywords.
• Make use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
What constitutes a quality backlink?
When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, first and foremost is the number of quality inbound links to that site. So just having inbound links isn’t enough; the quality of each inbound SEO backlink is what matters. Search engines consider the content of the site to determine the quality of a link. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the higher their quality. That is, when inbound links to your site come from sites that have content related to your site, these links are considered more relevant (and vice versa). In recent years, a search engine’s standard for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher in response to black hat SEO practices like hidden links and link farms.
Some other factors that determine quality backlinks:
• Backlink comes from an authoritative site.
• Both sites have content relative to the keyword.
• Anchor text is descriptive and relevant to the content to which it links.
How WSA Helps
Building quality backlinks should be very high on your SEO to-do list. Web.com Search Agency can help you get backlinks, improve your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive interested traffic to your site.
Web.com Search Agency can also check out the current links to your site, which may have been obtained through now-discredited practices, and determine whether one or more links may be creating a search engine penalty. We can then improve the search engine’s trust in your site by advising you on how to remove bad links, or overcome them with trustworthy links from relevant sites.
Tags: backlinks, SEO backlink
Just a little FYI regarding "Make use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter." for backlinks.
Links on facebook DO NOT count as a backlink. If you look at thier source code… not only does the link have a nofollow tag… the href has the word "UNTRUSTEDLINK" in it.
So people… don't think by adding a link to facebook it counts as a backlink to your site. You might recieve clickthrus but will gain no ranking because of it.
Thanks for the comment! Let us clarify: Making use of Facebook and Twitter is not meant to imply that you would expect link popularity from your Facebook and Twitter profiles. (However some pundits are indicating some weight or value in the current algorithms.) Rather, you improve your prominence (and by extension your site’s prominence) by becoming a resource in the internet community. Commentators can get direct links to their own sites when they are referenced for postings they make on social networks. Basically, you are getting your “brand” out there, and that leads to getting more natural links from Facebook Friends, Twitter Followers, and anyone else who references who you are and what you do.