Backlinks are a major part of the search engine optimisation process and are imperative to increase a websites search engine position. For those that don’t know, backlinks are the links that connect one website to another, so that when it is clicked a completely different website is opened. For example, clicking web design Chelmsford will take you to Neon Digital’s website and this is a backlink.
How can these backlinks help improve search engine ranking?
Search engines results are based upon the relevancy of websites to the internet users searched for term and the level of authority that they also have.
Backlinks are crucial in building up a websites relevancy and authority.
In regards to relevancy, search engines are looking for websites that have a high number of backlinks from relevant websites with its logic being that if all of these websites are pointing to it then it must have high quality and relevant information on it and will therefore be returned higher in the search engine results pages.
As for authority, every webpage has an allocated Page Rank (PR) from Google. This is a numerical weighting between 0 and 10 (0 being lowest and 10 being the highest) which in itself is based on a complex algorithm, althouugh Google claim that this factor is irrelevant, it is an indicator of how valuable Google deems the the page to be. Therefore, if a website obtains one backlink from anouther website with a high PR (5+) then this potentially can have a greater and more positive impact than a numerous backlinks from websites with low page ranks.
What types of backlinks are there?
There are a variety of different types of backlinks available for website owners to acquire, each varying in importance and how effective they will be in an SEO campaign.
The most desirable links are one way backlinks. These as their name suggests are links that point at a website with no link going the other way, if it did the it would be a reciprocal link which are less desirable as search engines recognise the link swapping and reduce the weighting given to each.
Backlinks that should be avoided include those from scraper sites and link farms. Scraper websites are those that replicate websites by scraping the content of the original website and are utilised by spamming search engines. Whilst link farms are pages on the internet which contain nothing but links to other websites and are generally paid for. These emerged a few years ago when webmasters realised their potential to artificially improve search engine position, however the main search engines recognised these and swiftly removed any value that these links would have carried. Any website that is found using them could now run the risk of being penalised by Google and the like for using them.
How to build backlinks
When building backlinks, search engines are looking for a natural development of the number backlinks to a website. Too many and they will deem this to be unnatural and therefore will discard the value of the links or even penalise the offending website. Therefore it is important not too build too many backlinks in a short period of time.
One of the best methods of building backlinks is by writing content and articles for the website that other webmasters would deem to be important and relevant and link back to the specific website or webpage. This is what is known as link baiting and is one of the best means of building backlinks and increasing search engine position.
Finally, it is important to remember that once a website is ranking well, it is crucial to continually build backlinks in order to maintain a stable search engine position.
