Alnisa Designs & Co
Web Design & SEO Agency

Are Backlinks Still Important For SEO?

The answer is yes.

However, first of all, you may be wondering what exactly are backlinks? Backlinks are links from other relevant websites that link to your website via a phrase or keyword. Backlinks help boost your trustworthiness and credibility and send referral traffic to your site.

Acquiring backlinks to your site was a concept created many years ago within Google’s original algorithm and is still required to increase your ranking ability in Google search today. During this time, all one had to do was get as many random backlinks as one could find and point them back to their site to increase their Google search ranking and it worked.

However, if you tried this technique now, Google would serve up a stiff penalty and even blacklist your site from Google search altogether. Since Google’s algorithm has now been updated and backlinks are now based on relevance and authority.

As of 2022, backlinks are still the #1 ranking factor and the sites that have the most links in their backlink profile, maintain higher positions on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) according to Google’s ranking factors. Certain criteria must be met in order for them to provide value to your website.

For example, backlinks to another SEO Agency’s website with a high domain authority will provide plenty of link juice and boost your ranking as long as its in the same niche. This indicates to Google that this site’s domain authority is high because this site gets plenty of traffic due to referring domains it’s connected to in its backlink profile.

Nearly 96% of websites that have plenty of linking domains are usually older sites that have acquired natural links over time. Brand new sites have a harder time ranking since they havent acquired any backlinks yet.

What Is The Criteria For Creating A Strong Backlink Profile?

A strong backlink profile consists of:

> Relevance – Link to other sites that offer similar content or product or service
> Traffic – Locate sites that have organic traffic from keywords
> Authority – Sites are ranked from 0-100 whereas 0 means the site will likely not rank at all. 100 is the highest a site will receive indicating it will absolutely rank. This system is based on how much organic traffic a site receives.
> Link Quality – Sites are ranked from 0-100 whereas 0 means the site will likely not rank at all. 100 is the highest a site will receive indicating it will absolutely rank. This system, created by MOZ is based on how much organic traffic a site receives.

Check what your competition is linking to and if that link meets the above criteria then consider getting a link to pointing to your site.

What Are The Characteristics Of A High-quality Backlink?

Relevance to your website
Actual website with real organic search traffic
Website has a strong backlink profile

For example, if you are a sneaker store then you should acquire backlinks from other sneaker stores, retail websites/ blogs, and press releases that write about this subject.

Creating A Backlink

So what do you do next after you locate quality backlinks? Consider creating content that others will want to link to. For example, create a type of free guide or resource others will want to naturally link back to.

Blogging or writing long content articles that are over 2,000 words will work wonders for your ranking because people love content that offers them value by answering their questions or providing a solution to their problems.

Blogging for your industry attracts users that are interested in your content and gives them solutions to their problems or helps them locate information about a topic they are curious about. Blogging is the quickest way to get organic traffic to your site and this technique is referred to as the backdoor or side door technique instead of them accessing your site directly via the homepage.

The Process of Link Building

Link building is the practice of acquiring links to your site from other websites with a high-quality ranking that passes authority to your site.

Types of Link Building include:

Natural Links from Blogs or Sites – this occurs when readers organically come in contact with your content and link to your website from their blog or website without provocation
Guest Posting – includes your link on another’s website in a blurb that you provided to that site owner.
Replicating your competitor’s backlinks
Business Directories and local citations
Resources
Adding URLs to a Post
Social Media
Interviews / Product Reviews / Testimonials

How Link building Affects Your Website Ranking

Link building is strongly effective on a website’s ranking if its done correctly. Pages with plenty of backlinks rank above pages that dont have as many backlinks or none at all. The #1 results in Google have an average of 3.5X more backlinks than lower positions of #2-#10 on Page 1.

Backlinks Send Referral Traffic to Your Site

Google’s algorithm ensures that excellent backlinks send valuable organic traffic to your site.

In Conclusion

If you want to increase your organic traffic, you cannot ignore the importance of earning quality backlinks since its crucial to understanding how backlinks work to boost your ranking – helping to move your site closer to page 1 for more organic traffic within your niche.

Contact us so we can develop an effective SEO strategy with the implementation of our Digital Marketing and (SEO) Search Engine Optimization Services for your business website and improve your site’s ranking.

Until next time…