The Very Important Backlink

Hi everyone, once again it’s Beckton, back with another SEO (Search Engine Optimization) concept: backlinks. These are live active links from another website to your website.
In order to get your site high up in the organic search rankings on Google and other search engines, there are many things you can do such as properly using keywords and improving your page load times. But one of the most important things is to have a large number of quality backlinks.
What is a backlink exactly? A backlink is anytime someone else’s site links to your website or a web page. For example, If you have a restaurant and you get your website linked to by a famous food critic’s review this would be a great backlink.

Look at the metrics

SemRush data showing the backlinks and other metrics for Google

Let’s now take a look at some of the metrics used to evaluate backlinks and a certain website. The screenshot above shows some of them for Google.com. Google has a huge amount of backlinks, 10.4 billion, coming from 8.5 million different domains (websites). The Domain Score is based on the quality and volume of links that point to a domain. The Trust Score metric is higher if you have more backlinks from trusted sites pointing to your domain. Google automatically ranks .edu University sites and .gov Government sites high for ‘trust’.
 

Quality over Quantity

With backlinks it is not just about having as many as possible, you want to ensure that the ones you have are the highest quality possible. Search engines prefer high quality backlinks, and might penalize sites that have large numbers of low quality backlinks. A good quality backlink is one that comes naturally from someone else linking to your site, and not from a shady or spam-generating site. Sites with high Domain and Trust Scores are generally ones you want linking to you. Reputable media outlets, local or even better national media sites, industry organization websites and resource sites such as Wikipedia are valuable backlinks to have.  
 

Avoid Dubious “Strategies”

There are many dubious strategies that have been conceived of for getting backlinks but Google is constantly on the lookout for websites that violate their guidelines (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en) and punishing people who try to cheat the system. It is possible to purchase backlinks to your site, but this is totally against Google’s guidelines. People also conceive schemes such as link trades and link roundabouts, but the short answer is don’t do it!
There is no real shortcut to link building success, you have to create great content and web assets that people want to link to, let them know about it, and wait for the positive links to come to you.