Introduction

So here’s the thing, your business is investing in SEO at the moment, and things are going great, there’s just one niggling question that you have, that is- why is the SEO agency spending so much time looking for backlinks?

And that’s such a good question, as with many businesses spending thousands each and every month on SEO, well, as a business owner you want to know where your hard-earnt money is being spent.

So, this blog post has the aim of informing you about what backlinks are, why they are useful and also how they have to improve your businesses SEO.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are simply a link that takes you from one page on a website to another. Now backlinks can be internal or they can be external.

Internal backlinks quite simply just take you from one page on the website, to another page, but you stay on the same website.

So for example, let’s say you were looking for wedding dress inspiration, and you find a designer near you.

This wedding dress designer then publishes regular blog posts, and you see within the blog post that the wedding dress designer has highlighted the word “Vintage wedding dresses”, you click the link and then you stay on the same website, yet you are taken to the page that advertises the businesses vintage wedding dresses- this is an example of an internal backlink.

Then there’s external backlinks, and from an SEO perspective these are the more important backlinks.

Yet, here’s the thing, the backlinks that your business requires must be good quality, they must be built in a white hat way, plus the backlinks must be relevant to your business.

What does “link juice” mean?

Here’s what your company should be doing, they should be building backlinks which are good quality and working on getting more “link juice” sent to a page or the homepage of your website.

What do we mean by the term “link juice?”

Well, we like to think of link juice a bit like electrical power, so yes you guessed it, the more link juice you can send to a website the better. In essence the more power you are giving it, and therefore the website has a better chance of ranking higher.

However, here’s the thing, the links must be good quality and relevant. If the links aren’t good quality, well you might not be improving your businesses seo, you could be actually damaging it.

The reason you could be damaging your businesses seo is because poor quality backlinks could trigger a link penalty.

That’s to say the search engines, such as Google have been engineered so that they can detect low quality links. The part of the algorithm that does this for Google is called the Google Penguin updates, and these updates can detect low quality backlinks.

Why are backlinks so important?

Backlinks are important because they are one of the most important “ranking signals”.

For those that don’t know what “ranking signals” are, well there are over 200 and Google uses these to work out how important your company’s website is.

However, here’s the thing, not all of these signals are worth the same, that’s because backlinks are considered one of the most important, while say the meta title is thought to be one of the less important signals.

So, the more backlinks the better?

No, this is a mistake that so many businesses have made, that’s to say they have believed that the more backlinks they obtain, regardless of quality the better- this is a mistake.

The reason being is good quality backlinks can help to improve your businesses rankings, yet low quality links, well these could trigger a Google Penguin penalty.

What were the Google Penguin updates?

Google has made loads of changes to its algorithm, for example, you may have heard of the Google Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird updates long before now? Well all of these have helped to improve the algorithm.

The Google Penguin and the Panda updates have helped to punish websites that have used rubbish seo techniques, so that the businesses that use quality seo (white hat), and offer quality information, well these will have done better and this white hat seo can help to improve where a business ranks.

So, in a nutshell, if your thinking of investing in seo, or you are at the moment, well its only worth investing in quality seo, as if your business incurs a penalty, such as a Google Penguin penalty, well the businesses rankings will most likely go down.

So, tell me, how do you build backlinks?

We always recommend that a business earns backlinks, what we mean by this is a business should offer really good information, this is so other websites want to link to it.

So let’s say for example you run a business that sells tennis rackets, if you were to publish blog posts offering advice on which tennis rackets, for example such an article could be titled “4 great tennis rackets you can purchase for under £70.00”- well this article may well be of interest to a lot of people, so your business may earn backlinks from this.

This is how you earn backlinks, rather than asking business to link to your website.

If your business requires organic or local seo, then why not call us?