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Backlinks for SEO: an essential practice

By Arielle
On the agenda for this article:

You want to create links with websites to improve the notoriety of yours and stimulate your natural reference ? Have you thought about backlinks?

At first glance, backlinks simply look like ordinary website links. But if you own a site or are a marketing manager, know that backlinks have a very important role to play for your SEO.

In this article, Geekworkers tells you why backlinks are essential and what type of backlinks you should focus on.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a link present on your website, but which comes from another site. More clearly, it is also called incoming link.

Look at this example: a backlink from our site to Hootsuite. To illustrate our point, we decided to take the Hootsuite platform. So that readers can visit this site, we have therefore included its URL, which appears in pink in the text.

what is a Backlink?

Quality backlinks are a real help for search engines, such as Google, to index the content of web pages. In addition, quality backlinks show high authority for Google and will allow your site to rise to the top position on search results.

Backlinks are proof that your content is of high quality. They simply mean that other websites are authoritative and recognize that your content is trustworthy. The more other websites use your content as a backlink, the more Google is able to offer good content to users and will be able to promote yours.

Why are backlinks important for SEO?

Backlinks improve your position in the SERPs

If backlinks are one of Google's top ranking factors, it's for good reason! When several quality websites link to the same page, Google robots quickly understand that this page contains relevant content for Internet users. This is why it is necessary to obtain these links from trusted websites, because it increases the visibility of your site as well as your place in the ranking.

Backlinks to help your website's organic traffic

The more a web page contains qualitative backlinks, the more the organic traffic increases. It is an essential criterion for Google because it determines the authority of a website and indexing robots will more often take into account sites that have backlinks. The more quality and relevant backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it receives from Google.

Of course, the more robots index your site, the more your chances of appearing in first position in the SERPs increase.

The authority of the site that points to one of your web pages is important

Thus, it is obvious that for the notoriety of your website, you need as many backlinks as possible. However, be careful of the sites that link to your pages. It is important that they are quality sites, and not “spammer” websites. Because if this is the case, yours may suffer and you will not appear as a qualified authority website.

Check the quality of backlinks

There are many tools to check the quality of backlinks, like Semrush which allows you to have access to a lot of data on your backlinks.

look recycling-express.ch, which happens to have pretty good quality backlinks!

the quality of a Backlink

Anchor text and number of links affect your backlinking profile

The number of links directly affects the value of a link. The more links you have, the more values they have.

The anchor text is the clickable text of the backlink. It allows crawlers to understand the subject of the link. This is why this text must contain relevant keywords.

For example, a website might link to one of our SEO blog posts. The exact anchor text could simply be “natural referencing”.

Do you have any broken links?

Creating backlinks is good, but you still have to make sure they work. You can use Semrush, Small SEO Tools or Ahrefs. If you update your URLs or create new backlinks, check automatically!

Disapprove spammy links

You may receive fraudulent links, and you can disapprove of them. Thus, the Google robots will be able to ignore it and your PageRank will not suffer any consequences. Nowadays, you receive a recommendation directly through Google Search Console when a link seems fraudulent. 

How to get more backlinks?

Having backlinks is not always easy. However, there are several methods to help you:

  • Create visuals to share
  • Submit guest articles on blogs related to your field of activity
  • Create internal links

Differentiate between DoFollow and NoFollow backlinks

PageRank, one of Google's many algorithms, evaluates the quality and quantity of backlinks. The higher the PageRank of a link, the more authoritative it is.

This evaluation also takes DoFollow and NoFollow links into account:

DoFollow backlinks

A DoFollow link is nothing special, it is a simple link without an attribute. These backlinks simply ask search engines to crawl and then index them. When a website receives a DoFollow link, Google increases the PageRank value of the page in question.

Backlink NoFollow

NoFollow backlinks, on the other hand, tell Google that they should not be explored. They are also used for sponsored content, when, for example, a website has obtained compensation for linking to another site.

Thus, these links have no value for PageRank, because no authority is transmitted to the robot, and SEO is therefore not affected.

How to check if your link is NoFollow?

Right-click on a page and click "Inspect." You will see the HTML version of this page and can look for a “rel=”nofollow” attribute. If you can't find one, it's a DoFollow link.

NoFollow backlink

Therefore: the quality of backlinks comes down to authority

So backlinks are really essential for your natural reference. They quickly attract the attention of robots and allow you to optimize your chances of appearing in top position in the SERPs.

And for a quality backlinking strategy, so as not to entrust your project to Geekworkers experts?

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