Backlinks are the foundation of SEO. If no reputable site is linking to you (as a vote of confidence that your content is helpful), you won’t get any traffic or rankings from Google—no matter how hard you try.
That’s why mastering the art of link building is so important for your success in SEO.
Now, if you blog purely for creative self-expression, go ahead and build links as the spirit moves you. However, if you’re blogging for your business, you need a strategic link building framework so you can get the most out of your time and hard work.
But there are quite a few important caveats and misconceptions that you need to be aware of to make better link building decisions.
From WHAT BACKLINKS ARE to UNDERSTANDING THEIR ROLE in SEO and all the steps in-between...here is everything you need to know about backlinks.
What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important for SEO?
Backlinks are inbound or incoming links created when one website links to another.
In the most natural state, SEO backlinks are created because the webmaster or blogger believes the content on the linked page is helpful and deserves to be cited—so that internet users can also benefit from the information contained therein.
For example this article on “How to Build Backlinks For Beginners” on the superstarseo blog, we feel is an important resource that covers pretty much everything you need to know about backlinks.
If we leave a link on this page linking back to the blog (as we have done), it is because we feel it is helpful and can benefit you as our reader here at Legiit.
The SuperstarSEO blog can then be said to have received a backlink from the Legiit site. The blue underlined text (see above) is the backlink pointing from the first site to the second.
These backlinks are made up of HTML, a language used to mark up the text on your website pages. Here is how the raw code of the backlink will look on their (SuperstarSEO blog) site:
The “a” portion of the links stands for attribute, and the “href” stands for hypertext reference. Additionally, the URL portion beginning with “https” is the page you are linking to, the word “how to build backlinks for beginners” is the anchor text, and the “ closes off the attribute.
If you want to learn more details about the different types of backlinks, we’ve covered that extensively in our latest article FollowFlow: Maximizing SEO Potential with Do-Follow Links or Boost Your Website's SEO with Effective External Link Building: A Comprehensive Guide.
Having said that, let’s now look at why are backlinks important in SEO.
What is the Importance of Backlinks for SEO in 2024?
Let’s start with some facts here. According to Ahrefs, 66.31% of pages have no backlinks and generally speaking, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google.
Interesting. How important are backlinks?
Another study by the same company suggests that the top-ranking page gets the most search traffic only 49% of the time while 90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google.
What does this tell us? Google already confirmed that backlinks are among the top three ranking factors. So, if your site has backlinks—from reputable and authoritative sites—it has a higher chance of ranking—assuming all other best practices are in place.
Let’s simplify that further. There are two main reasons that website owners want to earn backlinks.
#1. They enable internet users to navigate web pages
Let’s refer back to the statistics we cited above. “Generally speaking, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google.”
Why is that so? Links enable internet users to move from one page to another on the internet. Therefore, the more backlinks a page has, the greater chance it has to be discovered by people.
For example, at the start of this article, we showed you a link example we added to the SuperstarSEO blog. If you click on it, you’ll likely be spending more time there, subscribing to their email list, downloading ebooks, sharing the link on social media, and so on.
#2. Allows Google to discover more web pages
The next reason why backlinks are important in SEO is pretty much like the first one but this time it serves search engines.
We’ll not go into the basics of SEO here but the first step to appearing on the SERPs is that Google has to find your page, crawl it, and then index it before serving it on the search results.
Backlinks are the natural paths that crawlers, bots, or spiders use to crawl pages on the internet which facilitates their ranking.
Consequently, if you receive backlinks from authoritative sites that are relevant to your niche, Google looks at them as votes of confidence for your site.
…and we already mentioned that in this article. The only reason we linked to the page on SuperstarSEO is because we believe the content on the page is helpful—and meets Google’s EEAT guidelines.
As a result, when Google eventually crawls it, it adds up to the ranking signal of the page and transfers some of our PageRank to them.
Lastly, if you can get hold of your competitor's backlink profile, you can use the backlinks to your advantage by targeting those sites to link to you to beat them on the SERPs.
That brings us to another interesting area that we want to cover.
How can I see the backlinks pointing to a page?
The easiest way to find and see backlinks on your site is through Google Search Console. It’s a free tool that shows you basic information about your links and what you have on your site.
Another way to find more complex data about your backlinks is using the Legiit GMSD dashboard backlink history—it gives you access to important metrics that determine the health of your backlinks and so on.
Here is a sample report of the site we were auditing.
With just the GMSD dashboard, you can:
- See the backlinks on your site
- Where they are coming from
- What’s the anchor text used
- When they were created
- Find broken links to your site so that you can request fixes from third-party sites
- Discover your link building opportunities
- Identify spammy links to your site
- See new links you’ve earned and links you’ve lost
Unlike GSC, this tool gives you access to data that can help you make informed decisions on your link building campaigns.
One such critical data is the ability to determine whether a link is good or bad. Point blank here, toxic links will hurt your SEO—and that means a negative impression on your target audience.
Let’s mention something briefly about these two types of links.
What makes a backlink good or bad?
Good backlinks:
- Come from trusted sources that have a meaningful relevance to your company or business
- Result from the quality of your content publication (EEAT)
- Are devoid of any link building schemes like link exchange
- Are relevant and from authoritative sites with good domain authority
- Have a diverse anchor text
- Are helpful to the internet user
- Are equally visible to both people and search engine crawlers
Bad backlinks:
- Result from link building schemes
- Are spammy and of low value
- Include any attempt to inject hidden links into website pages by exploiting security flaws
- Have a pattern of over-optimizing specific keywords
Having said that, it’s important as a webmaster or blogger to ensure that you’re only building links that add value to your site to skyrocket your SEO.
Let’s learn some of the link building strategies in the next section.
Backlink Building Strategies In 2024 and Beyond
Most popular link building strategies that you’ve probably heard fall into one of the following categories:
- Adding links – That’s when you go to some website and manually add your link there.
- Asking for links – That’s when you send cold pitching emails to website owners and ask them to link to you.
- Buying links – Same as above, but you offer them compensation (it’s important to note that this strategy can be penalized, the reason some of which backlink is least important).
- Earning links – This refers to creating and promoting something so noteworthy that people would link to it naturally.
Which backlinks move the needle?
Not all the strategies mentioned above are good for your link building campaigns, some of them are pretty harmful and penalized by Google through manual action.
Since we covered this part in detail in this article, The Art of Link Building Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Backlinks for Website Growth and Visibility, we highly recommend that you take a moment and read it.
Otherwise, here is a brief list of some of these link building tactics that explain how do backlinks help SEO:
- Guest posting – Write an awesome article for another website, from which you can link to yourself.
- Skyscraper technique – Find an outdated page that lots of websites are linking to. Create a much better one on your website. Then show it to all the linking websites.
- Resource page link building – Find pages that list resources similar to yours and request to be added there.
- Broken link building – Find a dead page that has lots of links. Create an alternative on your website and ping all the linkers about it.
- Image link building – Find sites that have used your images without proper attribution and ask them for a link.
- HARO and journalist requests – Contribute an “expert quote” for their article.
- Unlinked mentions – Find out where you’ve been mentioned on the internet (without a link) and ask to turn the mention of your brand into a link.
- PR – Publish a killer story, opinion, or thoughts that journalists from leading news sites want to cover.
The good thing about the strategies discussed above is that you can pick one or all of them and use them to build links to your site.
However, truth be told, you’re not going to get any success if you don’t apply them with a goal in mind. Be sure to figure out why you need the backlink and express that by investing your resources and dedicated outreach.
Are Backlinks Important For SEO? Final Thoughts
If you’re not at the peak of your link building campaigns at the moment, you’ve missed a lot of SEO opportunities.
The good thing is that we’ve discussed what is the importance of backlinks in SEO and now you’ve got the assurance that backlinks are important for SEO.
For the reasons discussed in this article, you need to build more quality backlinks to enrich your backlink profile.
It’s up to you now.
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