The quality of your website backlinks is one of the most important factors to ranking in search engines. Search engines look at links as endorsements. If one website links to you, that’s essentially a “vote” for your website.
If you get a “vote” from a high quality website such as Amazon.com or Apple.com, that’s counted as much more important than getting a link from just any website on the internet.
Without good backlinks, your chances of getting ranked for even semi-competitive keywords are almost zero. With great backlinks and great content, your chances of ranking for competitive keywords are much, much higher. Let’s take a look at the two most important factors to determining a link’s strength: relevance and authority.
Relevance
Getting a link from a website that is related to yours is counted much more highly than a link from a website that is not related to yours because search engines know that is how links are naturally supposed to work. Related businesses refer one another. People make recommendations to people with similar interests. If you suddenly get a bunch of unrelated links, search engines start to get suspicious. In other words, if you run a cooking website, it’s much better to get 50 links from other cooking websites than 200 links from clothing and violin websites.
Authoritative
In addition to relevance, Google also looks at the authority of a website when determining its link power. After all, if link count was all that mattered, anyone could just start 200 new websites and link them all to one site to get them ranked. That’s not how it works. Those websites need to have already built up credibility in Google’s eyes in order for the links to really count.
One way Google measures a site’s authority is through PageRank (PR). PR is a simple way of ranking how many websites have linked to that site. In turn, high PR sites can then link to another site and give them more of a boost than a low PR site.
PR isn’t all that matters, however. The website’s age, the amount of content, the time users stay on the site and how often they come back all come into play. In fact, over the last couple years, Google has significantly downplayed the role of PageRank in their algorithm because so many marketers have started trying to use PR to game the system.
Backlinks: The Bottom Line
The bottom line is this: try to get as many links as you can, from the best sites in your industry. You might not be able to start with the biggest sites, but start with websites that you admire and respect and work your way up to larger sites from there.
