What is a Backlink, What is It for and How to Get It?

Who more or less with basic notions of organic positioning (SEO), will have read about backlinks. Currently, backlinks or links are still very important in the organic positioning (SEO) of a website. A study with 15,000 keywords carried out by Moz found that 99.2% of the websites that indexed in the first 50 results had at least one link pointing to their website. This does not mean that it is impossible to position a web page without external links, although it is true that for competitive keywords, it will be difficult to position them without external links.

That said, in this article we are going to define what a backlink is, what it is for and what types exist.

Today, more than 3.5 million articles are created every day, so investing resources to create quality content without thinking about creating links is not a good strategy if you want your articles to have visibility on the Internet.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a link or link that another web page has placed towards ours through an anchor text or anchor text. In other words, a link or a backlink is a kind of mention that other people make about our website. They are very important for SEO, since through them we are able to transmit authority and give our website more visibility.

When it comes to Offpage SEO (or link building), backlinks or incoming links are the most important part of the strategy, since, initially, the more Off Page links (outside our website) we get to our website, the more authority we will generate. . But beware, the quality of the links is crucial, so not everything goes. The more authority a website has, the more quality the link to your website will have. So, the quality of the link is more important than the quantity of these.

When entering the world of links, at first it is easy to confuse backlinks with external or internal links. And it is that although they have certain similarities, they are different things.

Internal links: links that serve to link different URLs within the same website.

External links: links pointing from our website to any other domain. They are generally used to provide additional information.

Backlinks or incoming links: links from other websites that point to ours with the aim of gaining notoriety in Google.

Why are backlinks important and why do I need them for my website?

As we have mentioned before, Google takes these incoming links as a sign of authority on a website. The more quality web pages that mention your business, the more likely it is that Google's algorithm considers that your website is also of quality. Also, if you get them to point you to a website in your sector, the link will be much more important. For example, if you are looking for a dentist, it is not the same that another dentist recommends it to you than your... hairdresser, is it? In other words, Google gives more value to incoming links that are from your sector. And is that Google always seeks to imitate human behavior. In other words, if you are looking for a good dentist, you will probably trust them more if they are recommended to you by colleagues in the sector (other dentists, nurses, clinics...) than if they are recommended by people from other sectors (plumbers, lawyers, electricians...).

Therefore, when creating a strategy for generating links, it is important that you focus on those pages that have the most authority and, if possible, that are from your sector and that bring you traffic. The pages that have the most PageRank or authority are usually those of state agencies (.gov), universities (.edu), newspapers and/or magazines, and blogs specialized in your sector.

Besides, focusing on getting backlinks, you should also take care of them and control them. In this task the first backlink checker and tracker tool, Links Guardian will help you.

It is true that there are many other metrics that Google evaluates, but backlinks are still one of the main signals that the search engine uses to consider a site worthy of appearing among the first positions. After all, if a website doesn't have any inbound links, it probably doesn't deserve to appear. At least that's how Google understands it.