Backlinks – What are they and why are they so important for your SEO and Digital Marketing?

You get a backlink when another site links to you. That means that they like you enough to do you a favor – to take the time to write some copy about you, then write the HTML code that would create a backlink to your website, and put it live on the web to share with their valuable audiences. Persuading bloggers, news sites, influencers, and experts to give you backlinks is one of the most powerful marketing strategies you can follow – and apart from the effort you invest in persuading them, it’s free!

In addition, link building brings other substantial marketing benefits that help your website or online business to prosper. Whether you intend to work with an external SEO agency, recruit a search marketing specialist to join your team, or intend to develop your search optimization skills, you need to understand what link buildings are all about.

Majestic is an essential suite of SEO software tools to research, plan, and monitor link-building campaigns. In this article, I’ll explain how to build backlinks, their benefits to your website, and how Majestic provides Link Intelligence to help you understand your market and outperform your competitors.

We’ll cover:

• A simple link-building process
• How quality backlinks benefit your site
• Why backlinks are so important to Google’s algorithm
• How to size up a backlinks prospect
• How to get quality backlinks

A simple link-building process

Backlinks can arrive by chance – someone just comes across your site and thinks ‘Wow, my readers will love this’ and share it with them. It’s great when that happens, but it really is a rare event. If you just wait for those kinds of backlinks to appear, you’ll only get a trickle – not enough to have any effect on your search engine rankings.

The truth is, you’ve got to actively seek out those people and persuade them to give you backlinks and that breaks down into 5 simple steps:

• Find relevant markets that could give you backlinks
• Understand what your competitors' building strategies
• Find quality backlink prospects that you can approach
• Create compelling reasons for other sites to give you backlinks
• Ask for backlinks, monitor results, and learn how you can ask better in the future.

This is the process of link building and Majestic can help you at every stage of the process but when you start to build links, you’ll face a lot of competition.

Many of your competitors already know the value of backlinks and they’re likely to be way ahead of you. And with their experience, they’ll be out there pushing their wares, chasing the same prospects as you, and using every trick in the book to make sure they get a backlink – and you don’t.

That means you can’t afford to wait, you’ve got to quickly understand why backlinks are given, you’ve got to put the work in to actively identify backlinks prospects, and you’ve got to produce creative content that they will love. Then pitch your content to them in a compelling way.

It’s a challenging task to manage that! This is why we created this post – to help you learn everything necessary to attract quality backlinks to your website.

How quality backlinks benefit your website

Link building is hard work but the resulting backlinks bring multiple benefits to your site. These include:

• Backlinks boost your Google rankings – everyone wants to get higher rankings on Google, so this is by far the most popular benefit – but it’s not the only one (as you can see below).
• Backlinks direct visitors to your website – This may result in conversions. Notably, this is probably the second greatest benefit—witnessing a backlink on another site driving sales for you is incredibly satisfying!
• Backlinks give you bragging rights – being able to add ‘as featured on…’ and being able to mention some well-known blogs, influencers, or news sites will impress visitors and increase trust in your products.
• Backlinks attract more backlinks naturally – another benefit that many people don’t realize. If you’ve already got some quality backlinks on busy sites, a percentage of people on those sites will also write about and link to you – without you even asking.
• Backlinks allow you to do favors – yes, giving backlinks to others often brings you to their attention – and that means if you ask them to review some content of yours in the future, they’ll be well-disposed to help you.
• Backlinks establish your brand in your online marketplace – get backlinks from top blogs and sites in your industry and people will remember and respect your brand. This is a long-term benefit that should not be ignored, especially when justifying your work to your boss or client.

Such multiple benefits make link-building worthwhile for your business or your website.

Why backlinks are so important to the Google Search algorithm

Twenty years ago, Google was just a start-up with a mission to provide the best possible search results to people looking for information. Within a couple of years, they had blown the competition away with the excellent quality of their search results.

The reason? Google was the first to harness the power of backlinks – to realize that the keywords you included on your pages were only an indication of how good you might be.

They realised that what other people said about you on external sites where you had no control, was likely to be more reliable than anything you said about yourself.

And Google could ‘see’ what other people thought about you by ‘looking’ at the backlinks that pointed to your pages. And Google’s algorithm did that at a massive scale – they’ve crawled trillions of web pages.

The Google search algorithm has become increasingly sophisticated in its efforts to identify spam and provide quality results. As well as backlinks, the Google search engine has added over 200 factors to its algorithm to refine and improve results. Factors such as social media signals, website download speed, domain name age, website architecture, content quality and many others.

But quality backlinks are the strongest signal, and so will always be a fundamental part of how the algorithm works. Attracting quality backlinks is essential, and always will be essential to ranking well in Google search results.

How to size up a backlinks prospect

Generally speaking, the more backlinks you have, the better. But it’s not as simple as that – it’s the number of quality backlinks you have that is important.

We’ve created three metrics to give you maximum flexibility in measuring the quality of backlinks – here’s the easiest way to remember them:

• Trust Flow measures the quality of a backlink…
• Citation Flow measures the number of backlinks…
• Topical Trust Flow measures the context of a backlink.

Together, these powerful metrics allow you to immediately assess both domains and individual web pages with a simple logarithmic score of 0-100. Let’s look at each of them in more detail:

Trust Flow measures quality…

Whether you’re analyzing your competitor’s backlinks and link-building strategy or prioritizing backlink prospects, Trust Flow will give you immediate insights. Trust Flow works like “6 degrees of separation” – we measure how close or how far away any page or domain is from a seed set of many millions of trusted sites. The closer a domain name or page is to this set of trusted sites, the higher its Trust Flow will be.

Citation Flow measures quantity…

Sometimes you want to focus just on the number of backlinks that point to a website, particularly useful when assessing competitors. For quality sites, Citation Flow and Trust Flow will be in the same range – just analyze a couple of trusted sites in your industry to see this in action. However, if Citation Flow is significantly higher than Trust Flow, it may be a sign of unfair or artificial competitor practices.

Having two metrics, Citation Flow and Trust Flow gives you rich detail that a single domain metric can never give you.

Topical Trust Flow measures context…

Topical Trust Flow refines the analysis you can do by showing you the ‘Topics’ from which a web property gets its backlinks. Any substantial website will get backlinks from multiple niches – so a ‘mountain bike site’ will get links from cycling sites, but also from business sites, events sites, safety sites, urban sites, and many more.

To create this metric, we took our set of millions of trusted sites and classified them into over 800 topics. Again, we drew inspiration from ‘6 degrees of separation’ to show how close or far away any page or domain is from any topic – the closer a web property is, the higher its score for that topic.

How to get quality backlinks

You will get high-quality that can grow your online potential, our consultancy can make a plan that can be accessible or affordable

If you’re prepared to put the work in, then even modest sites can compete in the search results pages.

Reach us via mail: [email protected] to get quality backlinks that drive progress