A friend recommends your business to someone at a networking event. That person looks you up, visits your website, and sends an enquiry.
You didn’t pay for an ad. You didn’t send a cold email. Someone simply vouched for you, and it worked.
Backlinks work the same way, except the recommendation happens between websites instead of people. When another website links to yours, search engines like Google notice. And the more trustworthy recommendations you collect, the better your website tends to perform in search results.
Here is your handy guide to understanding backlinks.
What exactly is a backlink? – Advice from a digital marketing company
A backlink is when one website links to another website’s page.
You might also hear them get called inbound links or incoming links. But they all mean (and do) the same thing, a different web page sends people your way.
Say you run a restaurant, and a food blogger writes a review about their dinner with you. If the blog includes a hyperlink to your website, that’s your backlink. Google’s crawlers follow that link, discover your page, and take note that another website thought yours was worth referencing.
One link on its own usually won’t change much.
But when multiple websites link to you, and especially when those sites are well-known and relevant to your industry, Google starts treating your site as more authoritative, pushing your pages to rank higher.
Why backlinks matter for SEO (search engine optimisation)
Google has confirmed that backlinks are one of its top three ranking factors, alongside content quality and a system called RankBrain.
But rankings aren’t the only reason backlinks matter. They also help with three other things that are easy to overlook.
Referral traffic
Every backlink is a potential doorway or essentially a free advert.
When someone reads an article on another site and clicks a link to yours, that’s a visitor you didn’t have to pay for through ads.
If the linking site has a large, relevant audience, a single backlink can send a steady trickle of visitors for months or even years.
Faster indexing
Google discovers new pages by following links across the web.
If your site is relatively new or you’ve just published a fresh page, backlinks from already-indexed sites help Google find and index your content faster.
Of course, there are other methods to help index your page faster, but backlinks can speed up the process.
Brand visibility in AI search rankings
This one’s newer and worth paying attention to.
AI-powered search tools are completely changing the way answers are pulled from the web.
Websites that are frequently referenced and linked to tend to appear in those AI-generated summaries. This can increase awareness and boost the number of clicks onto your website considerably.
High-Quality Link Building
This is where businesses can get confused.
More backlinks do not mean better rankings. It is the quality that counts.
Search engines use complicated algorithms that weigh the strength of backlinks. But not to worry, we will simplify things to make it easier to understand. Stop yourself from wasting time building backlinks that don’t give you proper gains.
Authority of the linking site
Links from a national newspaper or a well-trusted industry page carry way more weight than a link from a brand-new blog.
SEO professionals often refer to this as domain authority. The higher the linking site’s authority, the more value its backlink passes to you.
Relevance of the backlink
Google also looks at whether the linking site is related to yours.
Say you are a hairdresser and a popular fashion site links to you, this will carry more weight than if a food blog links to your content.
Links from unrelated sites do not as much connection and aren’t weighed as strongly.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text on a link. This link gives extra content about what your page is about.
When other websites link to your site using relevant anchor text, it helps search engines understand your content more clearly and can improve how relevant your page appears for those topics.
Link placement
Where the link sits on a page matters too.
A backlink within the main body of an article, surrounded by relevant content, is worth far more than one buried in a footer or sidebar.
Google’s algorithms can tell the difference.
Dofollow vs nofollow: what’s the difference?
Whenever a website links to you, the link comes with a small piece of HTML code that tells search engines how to treat it. There are two main types you should know about.
Dofollow links are the ones you want most. They pass link equity (sometimes called “link juice”) from the linking site to yours, meaning Google counts them as a genuine vote of confidence. Most standard links are dofollow by default.
Nofollow links include a tag that tells Google not to pass ranking value. Social media links and blog comments are typically nofollow. They won’t directly boost your rankings, but they still bring referral traffic and help build brand awareness, so they’re still worthwhile.
A healthy backlink profile includes a mix of dofollow and nofollow links.
If every single link pointing to your site is dofollow, that can look unnatural to Google.
How to build a backlink profile
Okay, so know we know what backlinks are, you are probably asking how can I build high-quality backlinks for my business?
There is a lot that goes into backlink SEO strategies. So much so, that we’ve made a whole guide on how to build backlinks!
First, make sure you’ve set up Google Search Console so you can see how many backlinks you already have. If you have the budget, SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz can also be really helpful for deeper analysis.
From there, it gets a bit more involved.
Creating genuinely useful content, doing outreach to relevant websites and publications, finding and fixing broken link opportunities to enhance user experience, and analysing what your competitors are doing can all help you earn more links to your website.
But probably the most important thing you should know at this stage is that earning good backlinks takes effort.
There’s no shortcut that doesn’t come with risks. Take your time with it, and the results are sure to pay off.
Be wary of anybody who claims to be able to provide “package deals” or “fast results”. This may risk
Reach out to Soapbox Digital Media for professional backlinks help
Backlink building takes time, energy, and patience.
If you’d rather have someone handle it for you, our SEO agency team will be more than happy to take over.
Here at Soapbox Digital Media, we have years of experience in gaining high-quality, relevant backlinks to help your website’s SEO performance. Our team of digital marketing experts can create and implement custom strategies that help launch your business to success.
For more information on our services, call us on 0141 429 1356.
