Things to Remember About Building Backlinks

Backlinks or incoming links to your website from other websites have a big influence on your search engine rankings. This is because Google and other search engine see them as an indicator of a website’s popularity which in turn is an important criteria for website rankings. So you need as many backlinks as possible, right? Not so fast.

It’s Quality What Matters, Not Quantity

It’s great to have a large number of backlinks to your website. But the quantity alone won’t do the trick. On the contrary, it can have the opposite effect. Extremely large number of links, especially if built in a short period of time, can be interpreted by search engines as an attempt to manipulate them. And in this case, you can’t escape penalty in the form of demotion or even complete removal from search engine indexes.

Rather than focusing on quantity, you should focus on quality. If you want for backlinks pointing to your website to have any effect on search engines, they need to come from established and well-ranking websites with relevant content.

In addition to quality, search engines also put a major emphasis on natural links. In other words, the greatest value have backlinks that were left on other websites by web users. This is because natural backlinks are truly indicators of a website’s popularity with the users. On the other hand, you have no control over where natural backlinks will occur. And unless there are at least a few authority websites, their influence on search engine rankings is very uncertain.

Many link building strategies also include paid techniques not only to increase the quantity but quality too by purchasing links on authority websites. But since search engines have very strict rules about buying and selling links, it is of utmost importance that it’s done by following their guidelines.

Conclusion

Building backlinks continues to be one of the most important search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies although the actual strategy has changed a lot over the years. The emphasis has shifted to getting quality and preferably natural backlinks which, however, can be acquired only by offering value to website visitors. So if you want to impress search engines, think on how you will impress and inspire your website visitors.