SEO Basics: Strong Backlinks Improve the Visibility of Your Website

What are backlinks?

A backlink is an inbound link that leads the user from an external website to your own homepage. At this point, the link generator can refer to both the main page and a subpage of the link taker, so that a large number of different backlinks can be generated. Google as well as other search engines evaluate backlinks as an important form of online reputation, which underlines the relevance of a website. However, the strength of a backlink depends on the quality of the linking website. For example, brand awareness can be particularly increased if well-known industry giants report about their own company online.

Therefore, in order for the contents of your own website to be successfully indexed by Google and for your own company to gain in importance, the backlink profile should always be adequately maintained.

What are backlinks good for?

Backlinks have always been a signal for Google how relevant your site is. The principle is simple — the more website operators link to your site, the better your content must be. So if Google recognizes that your website is linked by many others, it feeds this knowledge into its ranking decision. The result is a better ranking of your site. In other words, you appear higher up in the search results.

Which types of backlinks are valuable?

Not all backlinks are equally valuable. High-quality backlinks usually have the same key characteristics such as:

• They come from trustworthy, authoritative websites: This concept is called “Domain Authority”. The more authority a site has, the more authority it can essentially pass on to your site (via a link).
• They contain the target keyword in the anchor text: In general, the links should contain the anchor text that stands for the target keyword.
• Both pages fit together contextually: When a website links to another website, Google wants to see that the two websites are contextually connected.
• The link is a do-follow link: Google and other search engines ignore links with the no-follow tag attached. This means that the crawler does not follow (does not visit) a page linked via no-follow, even if the page is linked to. So no-follow links do not count for search engine algorithms. For example, links from these sources are usually set to no-follow: blog comments, press releases, paid advertising
• The link comes from a domain that has not previously linked to your site: It is better to get 100 links from 100 different websites than 1,000 links from the same website.

The quality of the backlinks is crucial

When implementing long-term link building measures, a number of quality characteristics should therefore be considered with regard to backlinks. First of all, a backlink is always classified as important by Google if it can demonstrate thematic relevance to your own website.

The authority of the domain is also taken into account by the search engines when evaluating backlinks. The so-called domain authority is sometimes determined by the number of incoming and outgoing links, the domain age and the backlink quality of the linking site. Even websites with a very high traffic serve as ideal link providers, since they often generate particularly high visitor numbers when they are referred back. However, it should be mentioned at this point that the relevance and authority of the linking domain is of much greater importance.

Backlinks are still one of the most important SEO factors, so the right link building strategy helps to achieve demonstrably better rankings. Therefore, it is always worth taking a look at the backlink status in order to profit from strong backlinks in the long term.