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Importance of backlinks for seo
What is a Backlink? Are backlinks important for SEO? Why are backlinks important? The need to understand and implement high-quality campaigns is essential if you’re going to compete and thrive online, and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Backlinks remain an important aspect in search engine optimization.

What is a Backlink?

Also known as “inbound links” or “incoming links”, backlinks are created when one website links to another website. If another business is linking your site on their website, they trust your site and your content enough to link to it. This is helpful for SEO as Google monitors which sites trust your site and content.

Reputable sites backlink to other reputable sites while spammy sites likely link to other poor-quality sites. Linking to any site with spam can result in Google and other search engines penalizing your site. Search engines crawl and reward or penalize site ranks to avoid leading users to any sort of spam. If you link to poor-quality websites, there’s a good chance your site will lose ranks.

Why Are Backlinks Important?

Backlinks are important for SEO because they signal to Google that another resource finds your content valuable enough to link to it within their own content. As a website earns additional backlinks, search engines infer that the website possesses valuable content worth ranking well on the SERPs.

How Are Backlinks Earned?

Gaining backlinks is an essential component of off-site SEO strategy. In fact, backlinks are the most significant off-site ranking factor! Backlinks are earned in three primary ways.

  1. Natural links are given without any action on the part of the website owner. For example, the mountain climbing illustration above would involve a natural link if the hiking gear website had no role in receiving that link. One of the best ways to organically obtain natural links is by consistently creating high-quality content.
  2. Manual links are acquired through link-earning activities. If the hiking gear website reached out to the climbing resource and requested a link, the backlink would be manual. Guest blogging for a relevant website is another strategic method of gaining a manual link. Be sure to link to your website within the content.
  3. Self-created links are created when a site manager manually adds a backlink into a forum, blog comment, or online directory. Be careful – while self-created links may appear to be the easiest way to gain backlinks, many of the tactics tend toward “black hat SEO,” strategies that negatively impact search engine reputation. These links are typically labeled by “no follow” tags.