It’s widely acknowledged that backlinks are important to most seo strategies, that’s whether your carrying out local or indeed national seo.

This article will now explain why backlinks are considered so important, also what makes a backlink considered good or indeed bad for seo purposes.  

Number of backlinks

It’s fair to say that a lot of people think that trying to get a website to rank for relevant keywords, without having any backlinks at all, well, that is thought to be a next to impossible task.

However, some digital marketing agencies will be able to testify, that it is sometimes possible to get a small local business to rank highly, and that’s without the need for any backlinks at all.

With that said, it does all boil down to the strength of your direct competitors, so if all your competitors have poor quality links, or no backlinks at all, then it’s sometimes possible to outperform your direct competitors, by also having no links as well.

That’s because if your competitors have no backlinks, and your website has no links, then Google will rank your website based on the strength of your other ranking signals instead. There are thought to be well in excess of 200 + ranking signals, so there’s loads of factors that Google can consider instead of using just backlinks.

However, if your competitors are strong, then it’s more than likely that you will need more backlinks than your direct competitors, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that these links must be of quality.

So, the simple answer is this, if your competitors have links, then you will need backlinks as well. But it’s not just about the number of links, it’s about how many good quality backlinks that you have, as it’s only these links that will help your websites SEO.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the brief snippet of text that describes what the backlink is about. Your websites anchor text should be naturally varied, that’s to say you shouldn’t have loads and loads of anchor text that all reads the same.

The anchor text should also help your websites visitor to know what the link is about, so for example if your website is about how to cure hair loss, it could be tempting from an seo perspective to write a bunch of anchor text snippets that simply stated, “hair loss treatment + city”.

That’s because that might be the exact keyword that you wish your website to rank for.

However, if the same anchor text is used repeatedly, then this is not considered white hat at all, so instead you should naturally and honestly describe the page through the use of the anchor text, where that backlink will lead to.

High quality?

Your seo consultant should seek out quality backlinks, plus also links that are likely to last sometime as well.

We always advise that it’s far better to build backlinks that are likely to last sometime, and that’s because if a link pops-up, and then in a matter of weeks it gets removed again, then such links might be deemed as rather unimportant.

Link juice

Well, quite simply put, your agency should be looking for backlinks that pass the right “link juice” through to your site.

This means that better quality backlinks = better quality seo results.

Link penalties

If a website builds spam links, or over optimises the anchor text, this can trigger a Google penalty.

The most notorious type of link penalty is the Google Penguin penalty, and if this is incurred it can mean that your website may incur a severe loss of traffic. That is why it’s so important to choose your next agency carefully.

Choose your next agency carefully

Building backlinks is a highly skilled task, and because of this it means that if the agency gets it wrong it can result in a sharp loss of business. So, use a reputable and trusted seo agency.