Introduction

So, are backlinks still an important part of SEO? And we would have to answer, a resounding yes, they most definitely are an important ranking factor, and some believe, that they are the most important ranking factor.

So before go any further, let’s start to look at what backlinks actually are, and why you need good quality links to improve your businesses SEO.

So, what are external links?

If someone has read your blog posts, and they find the work useful, then they may choose to link to your website.

For example, let’s say that you sell, you have a blog, and you follow different fashion brands, what you might write a glowing review with a new range of jeans.

Therefore, that brand of jeans might decide to link to your blog, so this would be an example of gaining an external link.

So why are backlinks important to SEO?

What the answer is simple, the search engines, whether that be Google or Bing, will use the backlinks as a vote of popularity of your website.

So, for example, let’s return to our fashion blog example, if you were to have thousand links, from good quality websites, let’s say a link from Gucci, then your fashion blog is likely to be deemed as high-quality by Google because you have gained a link, from a high quality brand and perhaps from other brands as well.

So, if you have quality links, quality brands, this can really help to improve your SEO.

Are internal links worth the same as external links?

In terms of SEO, we would say that having quality external links is really important, internal links are important but they don’t help to improve the SEO as much as external links to.

For example, if you were to have 100 quality external links, and also 100 internal links, it’s the 100 external links, which will really help improve your businesses SEO the most, that’s if the links are quality.

Google uses links to rank your site

When you visit the digital marketing agency, they should explain to you that Google uses over 200 various factors, such as backlinks to decipher, where to rank your website, for example, should it rank in position one? On the first page of Google? Or should it rank on page 10 of Google?

Conclusion

So, to conclude, we would say that backlinks are still a really important part of SEO, however, the backlinks must be good-quality.

Also, our agency would recommend, that your business never ever purchases backlinks. Instead, backlinks should always be earned, the best way to do this, is for your business to publish high-quality content marketing such as blog posts. If the blog posts are excellent quality, in that you offer good quality advice, then other businesses may link to you.

So, for example, let’s say you are a fashion blogger, and you write about a new range of T-shirts, sunglasses and baseball caps, the manufacturer might link to you because you have mentioned the brand, but also other fashion bloggers may also link to your work as well.