Backlinks and their importance for SEO

For those who work in  Digital Marketing,  you know very well that SEO is an essential practice for generating organic traffic for your blog and that  quality backlinks  are essential in this strategy.

But for many people and companies this is still a discovery, and many end up not making use of this resource.

When we talk about  website optimization  for search engines, few still understand the real importance of this for their online business.

I see many people look at this as a product where you buy, use and that’s it and everything is already solved, as if it were a simple band-aid to solve the problem quickly.

Anyone who works with SEO  knows very well that this is not the case, website optimization is something much more complex and involves several strategies.

We must always take into consideration and show people that there are many criteria for positioning a page on Google, for example, not to mention that it is constantly updated.

With a lot of study, it is even possible to understand how some factors work, and thus create strategies to help with  Google rankings .

There are many actions, sometimes easy and sometimes more complex, that need to be carried out regularly, including page improvements, content generation, On-page SEO , keyword definition, etc.

And one of the most important factors in an SEO strategy is  quality backlinks .

And understanding  what backlinks are  and their types is very important.

What is backlink?

A backlink is not difficult to understand, it is any and all links from a website that point to a different one.

An example of this is when a website publishes a news or article and references another website by linking to it, this is a backlink and is of great importance in the  SEO strategy.

The importance of Quality Backlinks for SEO

Understanding what  quality backlinks are , we can now start talking about their importance for positioning websites in search engines.

Many would wonder right away, the more links to my website, the more trustworthy it is, right? And so you start to  position yourself better , right? And how does Google work? If we want to simplify the answer, we can say YES.

However, in practice it’s not just that, if it were, it would be enough to have thousands of links to rank first, and the one with the most links would be there and that’s not what happens.

Right from the beginning, this thought would be right and it would probably be in first position, but with the evolution of Google, new updates and improvements began to appear and with this other factors emerged to avoid the rampant marketing of links and even link SPAM.

When it was just the number of links, many irrelevant sites that only had backlinks appeared in the first results, this caused a lot of headaches, since the search was not as precise, Google’s updates greatly improve the issue of relevance for the user, who started to use backlinks more intelligently, bringing more factors related to links such as quality, the word where the link is, the site’s niche, among others, leaving aside the quantity itself. That’s where  quality backlinks come in.

This is a simple way of saying that links are important, but not their quantity per se but their quality.

Quality backlinks are   very important in the  SEO strategy , and earning these links is a fundamental task, but as your blog generates relevant content for people this becomes easier.

It is much simpler and more natural to get a games and entertainment portal to link to an article about a specific game, so that Google interprets that it is related and that the link is relevant to those who consume this content.

Now imagine a different situation where a health and diet website places a link to a gaming website? Weird, isn’t it?

This link will not have the same weight and relevance as the related one (from the same niche), so the quantity itself is not the main factor today.

It is very important to do a good job of  Link Building  so that we can generate quality in the links generated and that have a context.

Understand that linking to your website is an excellent way to begin to better understand the world of Backlinks, where you need to know everything from the niche, profile, subject and other related information.

Google itself helps you with this with the  Search Console tool  and  Google Analytics , where you can see who has links to your website.

Types of Backlinks

Know that there are types of links that can be generated for your blog, and this influences the site’s positioning in search results.

Google gives some recommendations to website owners when creating links, all to help inform the relevance of the link.

• Nofollow links : these links are configured to not convey relevance (value) to the destination website, so Google ignores it or gives it a low value
• Dofollow links : these are the main links to help with the SEO strategy, they convey relevance to the target website. Any link that is not Nofollow is automatically Dofollow, the more natural this type of link, the better it is for you
• Inbound link:  External link, it is a link from another website that points to yours in a very simple way
• Outbound link:  it is the outgoing link, it is what goes from your website to another website
• Internal link:  is a link from your website to itself

This is just to understand a little more about  quality backlinks  and how important they are to your SEO strategy .