If SEO is a part of your overall marketing strategy, then you’ve probably heard of backlinks. 

Backlinks or inbound links, quite simply, are links that direct anyone who clicks on them back to your website. As far as SEO is concerned, the number of backlinks a website has is a good indicator of a website’s popularity. The more backlinks you have, the more reason search engines, Google especially, will believe that your site is relevant to related search queries that you want to rank for.

However, it’s not enough to simply have a lot of inbound links. They need to be of high quality. The site that’s linking back to you has to be relevant to the content on your site to actually influence search engines to recognize it and boost your ranking.

Still, need a bit more convincing? Check out the following four reasons:

1. Backlinks help search engines find your new pages

Google uses “Google Spiders” to sweep the Internet for new pages. Google spiders use backlinks as a way to crawl and index through the millions of websites available online. To that end, it makes sense to assume that a lot of backlinks should raise your chances of being found faster. It helps Google index your site faster and ensures your website shows up higher on rankings, while shortening the amount of time it takes for Google to find your site.

2. Backlinks contribute to building your reputation

Remember, a search engine’s goal is to point you in the right direction. Human judgment can probably easily determine what is relevant for a user. However, search engines like Google run on algorithms that are created and designed to sweep the entire Internet and determine the best information they can present to its users. Since search engines only run on algorithms, backlinks serve as Google’s way to weigh whether or not they’re sweeping and gathering the right information for its users. More backlinks imply higher popularity, and the more popular a website, the higher its trust factor is.

3. Relevant, high-quality backlinks can do a lot for your site’s credibility

Hinging off the previous point, it’s important to make sure that you not only have a significant number of backlinks, these links should also be of high quality. For example, you may have backlinks to over a hundred sites, but if you’re a food blogger with backlinks to sites that have nothing to do with dining or cuisine, Google is going to assume that you’re not credible. On the other hand, if you’re a food blogger with backlinks to restaurants, food websites, recipe databases, and lifestyle blogs, Google can safely assume that your content is of value to people in a similar industry.

4. Backlinks drive traffic to your site

The added traffic boost that related websites bring to your website helps boost your credibility to search engines. Low traffic sites generally have low trust scores from Google. So, continuously building towards gaining more traffic helps you develop a good reputation that improves your rankings.

Still unsure on how you can leverage on backlinks to boost your SEO and supplement your content marketing efforts? Reach out to me at Leadspanda and we can discuss how I can help you.