Do you really need to build backlinks to optimize your website?
If you’re interested in search engine optimization (SEO), you might wonder whether it’s necessary to build backlinks pointing to your site. Because building backlinks is challenging (and sometimes expensive—especially if you build them correctly), many optimizers try to get by without building them at all. But is this a viable strategy? Or are backlinks necessary to improve your rankings?
Relevance and Authority
Your search rankings are determined by two broad categories of determination: your relevance for a given query, and your overall authority. Relevance refers to your appropriateness for various queries, and is largely determined by the types of keywords and phrases present on your site and in your offsite strategy.
Your authority is a bit trickier to calculate. While your authority is partially dependent on the quality and quantity of content on your site, it’s more heavily determined by the number and quality of sites pointing back to yours—after all, that’s how PageRank works. In other words, without backlinks, you’ll have a hard time generating the authority necessary to get higher rankings.
One method to get backlinks is to attract them naturally by writing better content—but this is neither consistent nor reliable. It’s much more effective to build those links yourself; otherwise, you’ll be at the mercy of external publishers.
How to Build Backlinks
That said, you can’t build links on a whim and hope they’ll stick. Google’s standards for evaluating backlink legitimacy and quality are harsh, to say the least. The best way to build backlinks is to write relevant content for offsite authorities, and find a natural way to link to a well-written blog post on your site.
This is a long-term strategy and a somewhat demanding process, so it’s much easier to leave this work to an experienced firm. If you’re interested in learning more about link building or SEO in general, contact us at Quez Media today!
