What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important for SEO

what are backlinks

You may have come through the word “backlinks” if you have any relation to content and SEO. Backlinks are among the best ways to increase your position on Google SERPs. So, it becomes essential to work on your backlinks, but there is no direct way to do so. So, here is what you should know about backlinks. 

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are links that redirect a user to your website from another website. Backlinking is an SEO opportunity to help you rank your website at the top of Google search results. Moreover, it’s an off-page SEO tactic as it deals with SEO without making changes to your page or website. 

There are many benefits of backlinks, so these are always focused on when creating an SEO strategy. Let’s understand backlinks with a simple example. 

Let’s say you publish a blog on your website named “How to create a Facebook profile?”. Now, there is another website where the owner uploads a blog about “How to change your Facebook profile?”. 

So, if the owner has decided to choose your blog’s link to educate his audience about “How to create a Facebook profile?” and added to a sentence in his blog that is “If you don’t know how to create a Facebook account, then click here”. 

This is how a backlink will be created for your website. It’s an overly simplified tutorial of backlinks, but it will help you understand what they are. 

Why are Backlinks Important for SEO?

Now, a simple benefit of SEO is that you can get organic traffic from other sites where you have your backlinks. However, there are many other benefits that backlinks have for SEO purposes. So here are the top benefits of backlinks for SEO. 

Search Engine Rankings

Google is one of the biggest search engines in the world, and it uses backlinks to authorize your website and its content. Simply put, if you have a good quality and quantity of backlinks, then Google will look at your content as valuable and rank you higher in the SERP. However, backlinks are not the only metric to consider a page’s rank in search results, so you will also have to look at other aspects.

Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

If you stay connected with SEO and its newest trends, you must have learned about “EEAT“, a framework by Google. If you don’t know what “EEAT” is, here’s a simple explanation. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. So, in the simplest way, these four factors are what Google uses to check your content’s quality.

Now, two of these factors, namely, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, can be earned with the help of quality backlinks. If other sites, which themselves are trustworthy in the eyes of Google, are backlinking your website, it will signal to Google that your content and website are also trustworthy. 

Crawl Frequency

Google, as a search engine, uses crawlers to go through the pages added to the web. If you add a new landing page to your website, crawlers will crawl it. So, with the help of backlinks, you can increase the crawling frequency of your website. 

It makes your website easily navigable, so whenever there is a search related to your website, content or industry, the chances of your website topping the search results will be higher as Google can crawl your website easily. 

Now that you know the benefits of backlinks, let’s explore a few more things about backlinks. One of these things is the types of backlinks. Yes, there are two types of backlinks, but it’s not based on the quality of backlinks. 

What are the types of backlinks?

There are two types of backlinks, namely, Dofollow and Nofollow backlinks. These two types have nothing to do with the quality of the backlinks but the way the backlinking is done. 

Dofollow Backlinks

Dofollow Backlinks are simple backlinks where no changes are made to the website’s HTML code. This type of Backlink lets the crawler crawl through the website backlinked on the page. For example, if a crawler crawls the page and finds Dofollow Backlinks, it will follow the backlinks and crawl the linked pages or websites. So, Dofollow Backlinks contributes to the SEO of your website. 

Nofollow Backlinks

On the other hand, Nofollow Backlinks are backlinks with an edited html code. The normal backlinks or Dofollow backlinks pass authority to the linked page. Thus, it helps to enhance the authority of the linked page. However, Nofollow backlinks are used to not pass authority to the linked website. It means the crawler will not crawl through the pages linked on a website if they are linked through Nofollow Backlinks. 

In simple terms, these backlinks don’t contribute to SEO. It is mostly used in user-generated content and backlinks from the comment section to avoid getting penalties from Google for unethical backlinking attempts

How do you build quality backlinks?

Well, there is no certified way to build backlinks that can work magically. Building backlinks through guest posts is a costly and time-consuming practice, so it’s not accessible to all. Other unethical ways, like false link building, can easily result in penalties from Google. So, is there any way to get yourself quality backlinks? There is a method called tiered link building, which claims to be a quality link-building practice. Here’s how it works. 

How Does Tiered Link Building Work?

In Tiered Link Building, you have to create a few first-tier backlinks which will directly point to your page. Now, you will have to create a few 2nd tier backlinks for each 1st-tier backlink. These 2nd tier backlinks will point to your 1st tier backlinks. Similarly, create some 3rd-tier backlinks for your 2nd-tier backlinks, and ultimately, you have a lot of backlinks indirectly pointing at your page. 

The benefit of doing so is first, you will be able to escape the penalties from Google, which, in the case of direct link building, can be given to you instantly. Moreover, tiered link building is easy to maintain. If you find any tier problematic to your SEO, such as if a tier is resulting in bad-quality backlinks, you can delete it directly. However, it’s still not a perfect way to build backlinks. 

Wrapping Up

This is what you must know about Backlinks. Being an important off-page SEO factor, you must consider it as it can help you get better at SEO. However, it would be great to contact an SEO agency in Delhi to help you. An SEO company in Delhi or elsewhere to better understand backlinks and their tactics.

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