How Important are Backlinks?

How Important are Backlinks? If you’ve read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you’ve come across the term “backlink” at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have stayed a key part of Google’s algorithm for a long time.

Backlinks are the links from other websites or pages to your website. They can be internal, for example here is an internal backlink to another blog post we did on GEO-Targeting, while this is an external backlink to a graphic design company we work with Sabrah Maple Design. The external backlink counts as an external link for Sabrah and for my website to benefit as well I would need to have a link from her website to ours. The internal link helps our pages to keep people on the website longer, which adds to a longer view time and thus more traffic.

Backlinks are important because they allow for traffic to come from other sites to yours and stay on your site longer once they are there by click to other pages on the site. They also count in your SEO rankings based on the types of links you have. A client DentalStaffing.org was recently asked by a similar company putting out content. The difference is that DentalStaffing’s links are higher quality and thus has a 0 spam score, while the other company has a 4 out of 17. Finally they change in importance for Google’s algorithm so continuing to work on them always benefits you.

THIS IS THE MOZ BAR THAT HELPS YOU VIEW THINGS LIKE SPAM SCORE

So if you have higher quality links your website will have better rankings. As an example you can see in the screenshot below that RoxyAnn as 1,886 links from their website. These links count towards their SEO rankings of 39 page authority and 32 domain authority. These page authority and domain authority change based on competitors and site changes so I anticipate with the new site update that the rankings will increase and thus traffic will increase too. Google incentivizes changes like these by sending you extra traffic and raising your rankings.