There are many factors that search engines use to rank the usefulness of your web content for any particular search.
- Length of your content — longer is often better
- The meta and schema — search engines want a clear idea of what's on the page
- Keyword presence — this helps search engines understand relevancy
But one crucial thing isn’t about what’s on the page at all — but what’s on other pages and sites.
If someone asked you if you’d rather read something that nobody’s recommended, or something that ten people have recommended, which would you choose?
The Power of Backlinks
A backlink is a link back to your website content. You can do this internally, linking from one blog post to another that expands upon a point within the first, for instance. In this way, you’re explicitly forming connections between your content that search engines pick up on — you’re telling them that you know these things are connected, and you’re demonstrating that you’re going to be a more helpful search result.
For instance, this article is discussing an aspect of search engine optimization. As you’re reading it, you may be interested in learning more about SEO — and it just so happens we can link you to another recent blog where we talk about how long it takes for SEO to start delivering results.
There’s also external backlinking. This is when you’ve got a link to your content coming from an external website — and this is a very powerful thing. It means that someone else has found your content good enough that they want to send their audience to it — and Google pays close attention when that happens.
As such, building and obtaining backlinks is a major goal for SEO specialists.
What Google Does With Backlinking
Google’s bots crawl the internet, and its algorithms rate the content according to their confidential methods. While nobody outside of Google can say exactly how it works, what we do know is that Google’s algorithm does favour websites and content that links to itself and especially that other people link to.
Want to watch a recent online workshop we held — all about SEO for B2B?
Search engines can rate both your internal backlink health and the number of other sites giving backlinks to inform how highly they should rank your content. They’ll also be able to understand how to adjust that based on various other factors:
- You’ll rank higher if the websites that provide the backlink have higher domain authority
- Links coming from relevant content are more valuable than links coming from random content
- Links in the body content are more helpful than links in sidebars or footers
Like with all good SEO strategies, there are no shortcuts. Don’t waste your time trying to get backlinks on linkfarms or stuffing them in where they don’t belong. Search engine algorithms are only growing more sophisticated over time, and there’s no substitute for doing the hard work of creating genuinely helpful and relevant content.
Take that time, and work to make your content worth linking to. Offer guest blogs to respectable websites that will be of use to their readers. Do periodic content audits on your own website, and ensure that you’re always adding links to posts as your overall content base grows.
Or, of course, get in contact with Flawless Inbound! We’re a high-performance team of content and SEO experts who know a little bit about creating awesome content that attracts readers (and leads!) to your website. Check out some more technical SEO tips here. Or learn more about how we’ve helped more than 80 B2B companies get the attention their expertise deserves through smart marketing right here.