You have probably heard of SEO and seen that there are lots of people and companies offering SEO services and guaranteeing that you will be at the top of google searches. This of course is not true – they can make every attempt to get you to the top but it cannot be guaranteed.
However, SEO is important for your business. The real challenge is that Google changes its method of ranking pages frequently and what is important today may not be important tomorrow.
However, it seems that one aspect is consistently ranked by Google as being important – and that is the concept of Backlinks.
What is a backlink?
The first thing to answer is what is a backlink. Simply put it is a link coming from one webpage to your webpage. These links are also known as hyperlinks or inbound links.
From an SEO point of view the more backlinks you have pointing to your webpage the better you will rank in the search engines. Google will also give you more ranking depending on the ranking of the webpage that is linking to yours.
Types of backlinks
- Follow links: In effect, these links pass the control and authority from the originating page to the destination page. When you are getting backlinks these are the ones you want.
- Nofollow links: A nofollow link, or backlink, is a link that does not pass authority on to the website it is linking to. These links do not help in terms of SEO.
How do backlinks work?
A backlink consists of:
- a link that can be clicked and take the reader from one page to something else (another page, a video, a PDF etc).
- the text that appears – this is called the anchor text. Anchor text can be words or an image.
How do you get backlinks?
Here are some ideas on where you could get backlinks. The main way to get backlinks is when you create content that other websites find to be of high quality and of interest to their readers then they will want to link to it .
The whole objective of your website is to provide value to your visitors and SEO is a means of making it easier for them to find you and as we have discussed backlinks are one of the most important ways of doing this. They may not be simple to get but they are definitely worth the effort.
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