What Are Backlinks in SEO? – A Guide to Understanding How Backlinks Work

In the world of search engine optimization, one of the most important factors is backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours – they essentially show that people value your website by linking to it and sharing information about it with others. They allow you to get more visibility in Google Search Results and help your site rank higher in the SERPs. An SEO blog post or website that has many inbound links can be seen as an endorsement of its content and its quality. So, if your blog posts or site does not have much content to begin with, an increase in inbound links might just make it look spammy for users. The same goes for sites with lots of spammy inbound link profiles – chances are high that their own posts won’t be any more valuable than what these other sites write about.

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is an HTML link from another website to yours. Every time someone visits your site and clicks on a link to go to another website, or if people share your website on other social media profiles, they are giving you a backlink. The more of these links you have the better your website will rank in search engines like Google. Backlinks are important because they signal to search engines that it’s worth paying attention to your website. In addition, by creating an authoritative site with lots of backlinks, you generally get a higher ranking for relevant keywords in Google Search Results. Since search engines look at a number of factors when deciding how well sites rank, including how many backlinks you have, this can be a good way to increase the organic rankings of your blog posts or websites.

How Do Backlinks Help in SEO?

Backlinks are important because they allow you to get more visibility. You can increase the number of backlinks by creating content that is viral and shareable, or you can use paid advertising to attract links. It is important to note, however, that not all backlinks are created equal – some are nofollow links, which don’t pass on any authority or other benefits. A study by Moz found that the average website has about 40 percent inbound nofollow links from third-party websites.

Backlinks help by making crawlers like Googlebot more aware of your site indicating it is of more value than others in the same niche. It is however only part of the puzzle and semantics play an ever more important role in addition to link building.

Types of Backlinks in SEO

There are a few different types of backlinks that you need to understand.

-Social Media Links: These links are from social media profiles, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. They’re usually followed by followers or people who have interacted with the content on the site before.

-Stumbleupon Backlinks: These are backlinks that come from StumbleUpon websites or other sources. If someone has clicked on one of your articles from the StumbleUpon platform, this is considered a backlink.

-Guest Posting: Guest blogging is when you write an article for someone else’s blog, community website, or web magazine. This type of link is also known as inbound links because it’s when someone writes about your content on their own website.

-Email Marketing Links: These links show up when people sign up for your email list and then make it public to share with others using email marketing platforms like Mailchimp or Aweber. It shows that they’ve opted in to receive emails from your business and want to share their experience with others online.

-Local Directory Links: These are backlinks that you get from local business directories or review websites. They can be great for getting more visibility in your local area and creating a solid online presence

-Image Links: Often used for paid marketing promotions or sponsored blog posts, image links can be placed anywhere on your website and are linked to another website or page.

-Footer/Menu Links: Since the Header or Footer is present on every page, links here are site-wide links.

Overall, there are many different types of backlinks that you can use to help boost your SEO rankings and improve your site’s visibility online.

Factors That Affect the Quality of a Backlink

Backlinks are very important in the world of SEO. But, not all backlinks are created equal. Not all links are created equal in terms of how they impact your site’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Some links will have a high value while others might be seen as spammy or provide no value to your website whatsoever. Depending on the content of your website, some backlinks could be seen as valuable and influential while others could be seen as spammy and worthless. For example, if you run a blog about organic gardening, many people might link to your post from related posts on their own sites because it provides them with extra exposure for their content too. If someone shares a unique article about vegetables that you wrote and links to it from their blog, it would be considered an authoritative backlink since that person is sharing information from a quality source.

Importance of DA, DR and other metrics in SEO with backlinks

When it comes to SEO, there are many different metrics that attribute a score to denote the quality of a website. Domain Authoirty (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are Moz’s approach and is a measure of how powerful your website is in terms of backlink profile. The higher your DA, the more authority you have in terms of backlinks. Domain Rating is a score from Ahrefs which ranks all the sites on the web, with sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube getting a 100 score. Since Ahrefs has been around the longest they have the largest database and are often considered the best. Trust Flow (TF) and Citation Flow (CF) are Majestic’s options, where one stands for volume and the other for quality. Finally, you have an Authority Score (AS) for SEMrush and these 4 different types of metrics make up the majority of all the SEO link terminology you will see.

Ultimately Google does not use these metrics and as such, they should be used as a guide and not the reason you try to get links. In our experience, it is actually best to use a combination of all 4 to make better-informed link decisions.

Conclusion

Now that you have the foundation for understanding how backlinks work and how they can benefit your SEO, you can use this knowledge to find a good SEO company and begin the process of increasing your rankings. Are you ready to get started? — A solid strategy for SEO can help your brand rank higher in search engine results and drive more traffic to your business. Outsourcing is a great way to jumpstart this process — the right agency can give you the advantage when it comes to getting noticed and capturing customer interest. But outsourcing alone isn’t enough. Your brand perspective is critical to drive success and avoid common pitfalls. Not sure where to start learning SEO? We have got you covered here as SEO Australia.