Backlinks are links on other blogs that when clicked lead someone to your blog. Just from the definition, you can already guess why they are important.
Backlinks are a pillar for any successful blog. If you have a blog or you are planning to start one, pay attention to backlinks.
There are companies that specialize in building backlinks for blogs. Link building is a growing field that is both important for bloggers and profitable for those in the business.
Other websites are in the business of selling backlinks. As a blogger, you pay such companies to have them link to you. Many companies pay bloggers to write sponsored posts and include links to their company website.
If this is your first time learning about backlinks, it is my pleasure to walk you through some of the basics of backlinks and why they are important.
Why Backlinks are Important for your Blog
1. Generating Blog Traffic
When you have many blogs around the internet pointing to your website, you will get visitors through some of those links. Visitors on various blogs that link to you will end up on your website through backlinks.
Traffic to your website from other blogs is called referral traffic. The good thing about referral traffic is their high interest in your blog content.
Not all readers of the blog that is linking to your website click on the link pointing to you; only those interested click. This means that readers who end up on your blog through backlinks are readers with great interest in your content.
These are the type of visitors who are likely to buy products from your blog, join your subscription list and buy services that you recommend.
Traffic from backlinks is so good that huge companies turn to bloggers to get customers for their products. As of today, there are thousands of affiliate programs.
These affiliate programs are agreements that bloggers sign with a company to send visitors to them and earn a commission when the visitors purchase products or sign up for services.
This shows how much value visitors from backlinks carry. Why would you not like to enjoy some of the great benefits of referral traffic by having as many backlinks as you can?
2. Ranking in Search Engines
Backlinks are popularly known for the role they play in helping a website rank in search engines. A search engine is a website that allows users to search for other websites. The most common search engine is Google.
Since most bloggers aim to get readers from Google, it makes sense to do what Google values so that your blog is ranked highly.
One of the major considerations in ranking web pages is the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. Search engines see backlinks the same way we see votes in an election.
A web page with more links from other blogs pointing to it suggests that the content on that webpage is of high quality. Search engines want to list the best quality content for searchers.
With this realization, many bloggers have doubled down on building backlinks to get favorable rankings on search engines. There are hundreds of tactics that bloggers use to earn links from other blogs.
Some of those tactics are discouraged by search engines as they find them to be unethical. But there are still many tactics of building links that are known around the industry to be ethical.
One of such ways is through guest posting. Guest posting is when you write a blog post on a blog that is not yours and get a link back to your blog.
Guest posting is ethical provided the content you are writing on the other blog is helpful for readers and not just for the sake of getting a link back to your website.
There is a lot of discussion in the industry about link building which I will not go into in this article. Some claim it is not a good practice while others advocate for it with their lives.
3. Authority in the Niche
Many links pointing to your blog show that the content on your blog is of great value. Within the topic that you blog about, you will be regarded as an expert.
When you get to expert level in your niche, you will have the privilege of setting the pace in the niche. Taking an example of the News niche, there are authority websites that we go to whenever we want to know current affairs.
The websites we go to for news have built a reputation for themselves in their space by earning links from millions of websites around the internet.
The information that is posted on such websites is trusted all around the industry. Many other blogs quote what is written on their blogs and in that process they earn more links that build their reputation even further.
As a blogger, you can as well build your authority by getting many backlinks. When you have thousands of links pointing to your blog and you become an authority in the space you blog in, great benefits will follow.
It is speculated that authority websites in some niches get special treatment from search engines. Whenever such authority websites post an article, search engines run fast to scan and index it. Other small websites may have to wait for a few days to have their articles ranked.
Backlinks are crucial in building the authority of your blog.
Importance of Backlinks Conclusion
There is a lot to learn about backlinks. Some bloggers do case studies once in a while to test theories that exist in link building.
Since this is a crucial area of blogging that can make or break your blog, it is wise that you pay attention to the unfolding of events.
Bloggers who completely ignore link building do injustice to their blogs. Any blogger that dreams of success must pay attention to backlinks.
As you keep researching about backlinks, take note of the extremes. Avoid completely ignoring backlinks. Going overboard with backlinks, likewise, is not advisable.
All the best!