Backlinks are the turbo boosters that push websites to the top of the Google search results page, both in the Local listings and the Organic listings. They are very powerful, but they must be created slowly over time and in a very specific way.
They must also be the last part of your SEO campaign. If you have sloppy onsite SEO or lots of inconsistent citations, then backlinks will be virtually useless and can possibly have a negative effect on your rankings.
Imagine a race car with bald tires, no brakes and, faulty steering. What would happen if you installed a brand new powerful engine into that car? What chance would you have of winning the race? You would be lucky if you even made it to the finish line without crashing and burning. The same principle applies to your website rankings. Make sure everything is clean and in good working order. Take care of the basics before applying power.
To understand what a backlink is, just go to almost any website on the Internet. Do you see words that are colored blue or purple? What about pictures that you can click on? When you click on them they link over to other websites or other pages? If so, those are backlinks.
Some people just call them links. Don’t be confused; they are the exact same thing. So, a backlink is anything on a website that is clickable and links you over to another website or webpage.
Google scours the Internet every second, every minute and every hour of every day. Their job is to index the millions of backlinks on the Internet to determine which businesses have the highest quality and most relevant backlinks pointing to their website. Each one of these backlinks is like a vote. Google tallies up the votes and starts to rank websites based on this information.
Pretty simple, right? Yes, the concept is simple but to acquire good quality relevant backlinks can be a challenge. And remember I said quality relevant backlinks. This is extremely important. If you do a Google search for “buy SEO backlinks” you will be inundated with companies trying to sell unknowing business owners low quality backlinks that will most likely give you penalties instead of rankings.
