Backlinks are a very important part of SEO optimization for your website, as they help you achieve better visibility and higher rankings in search engines. These are links that point to your website from some other external page.
How do backlinks help me?
You may think that having a link pointing to your website is not very helpful, however, search engines always take into account the quality and quantity of pages that link to your website, giving you a better “reputation” the more you have. This, in turn, makes it possible for you to appear higher in search results and can even help you reach the top spot, if worked in conjunction with other SEO aspects.
This is possible because during the 90s, two Stanford students (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) devised a plan to have a better search engine, which would not be fooled by website owners using false or massive keywords, but by the popularity of each one.
Basically: If many websites link to a specific one, it is because it must be very interesting, useful to the community, or contain valuable information.
How else do backlinks benefit me?
1. Improve your Ranking organically
As we have already mentioned, by having different websites pointing to your page, Google will give you more visibility and importance, since it considers that your content is relevant and useful to the community.
2. Faster indexing
Backlinks help search engine robots discover your site and crawl it effectively. If you have a website that is new, having backlinks will help you get discovered and indexed faster.
3. Referral traffic
Referral traffic is simply a visit that comes to you through another website. This type of visitor can increase your income because they are more likely to buy your services or products than a person who finds you by chance.
So I just need to link to a lot of websites?
You can get a lot of links from other websites that some people may know about and that will help your site's reputation, however, if you get some links from pages with a good reputation and high relevance, that will boost your own site quite a bit. In this case Google applies the rule of “Quality is better than quantity.” In the same way, it will not work, it will not work to point to your website many times from the same place..
Good backlinks and bad backlinks
- Good backlinks: These are links from prestigious websites with a high reputation. They improve your conversion rates and have benefits for your SEO. To get them, it takes time and dedication, as well as learning certain tips and backlink building strategies that you can find here.
- Bad backlinks: If you have received a large number of links in a very short period of time, Google will identify that these links have been generated artificially and you could be penalized.
In conclusion
Backlinks are links that point to your website from some other external page, giving it authority in the eyes of Google, so having a good backlink strategy will help your site gain reputation, visibility and positioning in search results, however it is a task that will require time and constant effort.