Quality backlinks are fundamental for any search marketing effort. Backlinks increase the quantity of reliable sites that connect to your own site and have direct ranking benefits for your site.
Direct Advantages of Backlinks
The more links directing users to your site from high traffic sites related to your product or niche, the more targeted traffic you’ll receive. This is the greatest advantage of having numerous external backlinks from reliable sites.
Indirect Advantages of Backlinks
The indirect benefits of having quality backlinks are the less apparent but stil play a significant role in your search engine ranking. When ranking your site, Google, Yahoo! and other primary search engines consider links to your site as votes of confidence. The more reliable high-quality backlinks your site has, the more trusted it is.
If you want a competitive web presence and a high ranking on in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it is important that you establish trust with the major search engines. The more trusted your site, the more authority your site will have and the higher ranking it will achieve.
How Backlinks Help SEO
Popularity
Backlinks are crucial in increasing the popularity of your site. The more links that reach to your site, the more it will be visited and the better it will rank on SERPs.
Significance
Search engines determine a site’s authority within its idustry once if it can verify backlinks from reliable and trusted sites.
Trust
If your site has backlinks from reliable and authoritative sites related to your product, services or industry, search engines will determine that your site is also reliable and contains valuable content.
Ranking Opportunity
If a site is popular with visitors, has significance among major sites, and contains trustworthy content, the better the chances it has to reach top rankings on SERPs.
Factors that affect the value of possible backlinks:
Age of the Domain
Anchor Text
Depth of the Links
Mozrank/Moztrust
NoFollow Option
PageRank
Placement of the Link
TLD Authority
Site Relevancy
Age of the Domain
Generally, older sites have better link equity. Links from older domains are considered more valuable than links from new ones.
Anchor Text
Anchor text or the text that can be clicked in a hyperlink is another major factor that search engines consider when ranking sites. Backlinks to sites that use use effective anchor text are a good indication of your site’s relevancy to search engines.
Additionally, the use of intelligent and relevant keywords in anchor text helps boosts a site ahead in SERPs. Keep in mind that having varying and diverse anchor text in your backlinks is also important for better backlink quality.
Depth of the Links
This refers to links from a one page to another within the same site, as well as links coming from pages other than the home page. The following are ways in which deep links, both internal and external, help the targeted page:
It signals to search engines the importance of each page in the site.
By using appropriate anchor text, internal links can increase the relevance each page and .
external links can increase the relevance of the site’s sub-pages.
Search engines support sites with multi-level deep links. Sites that naturally create links have more opportunities to have multiple external deep links. A high domain to deep links ratio can be an indicator for search engines of inflated, unnatural rankings. Therefore, it is important to create original, useful, and well-structured content for each individual page.
No-Follow Option
The no-follow attribute, introduced by Google in 2005, was designed to prevent comment spam by adding it to hyperlinks and effectively preventing PageRank, or link juice, from flowing into the link’s destination. An incoming link obtained without a no-follow attribute will earn your site a good PageRank and anchor text value.
PageRank
This is a system used in ranking the popularity of sites using a 0 to 10 scale, with a ranking of10 being the highest. The original algorithm design of PageRank associated higher link numbers with higher popularity for the given site. Today, a site’s PR goes beyond having a high number of links to your site. The idea is that getting links to sites with high PR ranks will boost your own PR rank and result in better search engine ranking for targeted keywords.
Position of the Link
Backlinks that appear within the main content of a site are more relevant than those placed in the sidebar or in the footer. To achieve this, many search engines dismiss the excessive use of poor backlinks in sidebars or footers and prefer websites that focus on links relevant to the site’s own content.
TLDs (Top Level Domains) Authority
Several TLDs have been identified to be more reliable and authoritative than others. Backlinks from .edu, .mil, or .gov are likely to offer more valuable relevance than traditional TLDs such as .com or .org.
Site Relevancy
A single natural link from an authoritative or reliable site relevant to your own industry is more valuable than several hundred backlinks from sites outside your own industry. There are many approaches used to obtain link from reliable sites, however, they all have one thing in common: good, relevant content.
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