Why Backlinks are Important to Increase Traffic on A Website

Backlinks constitute a significant part of SEO. They serve as one of the most productive ways to boost a website’s organic traffic.
Backlinks play a major role in how Google determines how trustworthy a website is. “Quality over quantity” is important to keep in mind when building your backlink database. 
However, generating quality backlinks cannot happen overnight. You have to be patient and cautious in order to generate quality backlinks.
A website’s traffic dictates the level of authority in which the backlink is serviced. Websites with high traffic are more coveted to be listed on and rank higher.

Other perks of backlinks:

• More organic traffic
• Faster referral traffic
• More indexing

It is important to keep an eye on your Google rankings. Google analyzes web pages by checking how the pages are connected to one other and what keywords are used.  There are hundreds of ranking factors, though backlinks serve as one of the most important metrics for SEO.

Google regularly comes up with updates concerning backlinks to find and penalize spammy websites containing a number of malicious backlinks.

For example, Google’s Penguin update.
It states that the backlinks obtained from directories, social bookmarking, PR sites, paid links, etc., will be considered illegitimate.

Therefore, your approach to backlinks must be highly ethical and calculated.

White Hat SEO:

It involves the use of ethical  SEO techniques to grow one’s audience in the most authentic way. White hat SEO has longer lasting results. Failure to engage only in White Hat SEO practices can get your site banned from Google and other search engines.

Why Does Backlink Quality Matter to SEO?

It is true, the more links you have to your website, the better it will rank.
Although, quality should not be compromised. Quality links confirm your website’s legitimacy, and when Google crawls your content, it is likely to rank your website higher which creates organic traffic.

Every backlink to your website is considered as a vote of confidence by search engines. Needless to say, if any other site is willing to give you a backlink, it means you hold some reputation on the web. 
Best practice is to pay close attention to what Google says regarding backlinks and to follow their guidelines as best as possible.  Plenty of tools and services are available online to help you begin from scratch. Moreover, tools, for example, SemRush, MOz, etc., give you a complete report of your website in the form of reliable figures.

One of the most prominent ways to track the progress of your website is through domain authority.
It is always best to have a high domain authority score, but it is not easy to achieve.

Domain authority is based on an algorithmic scale that ranges from 1 to 100.
Some of the factors accountable for domain authority are linked to data, age, popularity, size, and trust-related indicators.

If you do not know how to check domain authority, check out the steps mentioned below.

What you need to do is:

• Go to a domain checker tool.
• Enter URL of the site.
• Perform the CAPTCHA and click enter.

Within a few seconds, you will get the value of your website’s domain authority.

Make sure you stay updated with the metrics of your website so that you can figure out whether your backlink efforts are constituting high traffic or not.
Pro tip: Keep your team updated with the latest SEO trends by making them go through Digital Marketing Training. This will help them understand the importance of backlinks.
The graph below demonstrates the relationship between domain authority and high rank.

When you manage to earn backlinks from authoritative websites, search engines crawl more, and you get a higher score.
Advertising low ranking sites will affect your traffic and you may also minimize visibility on the web in no time.
Google appreciates only genuine backlinks appertaining to its algorithm.

When site owners tried manipulating the algorithm, Google, in 2012, penalized the websites that would buy or sell links.
Google has become stricter as it has started issuing manual penalties on the basis of a human review that decides whether a website is abiding by Google’s algorithms or not.
This ensures that the sites with spammy links do not get rewarded for their actions.

Which Backlinks Are Best?

This post clearly states the growing importance of backlinks. Though SEO involves so many ways to grow your organic traffic, backlinks have a proven track record so far. By now, you should understand that backlinks are not all equal. 
There are two types of links Do-Follow and No-Follow and they each hold different value with Google.

Do-Follow backlinks

Do-Follow links uplift the value of your pages.
When a webmaster gives you a backlink, both search engines and humans will be able to find and follow you on the web.  A do-follow link is usually given by allowing keywords in the anchor text.

Suppose you are writing for one of your customers, and you find an old post that is worth mentioning in your present post. What you can do is link back that post to your post which will enable Google to understand the purpose of linking to another source.

No-Follow backlinks

On the other hand, No-Follow links are simply an HTML attribute that acknowledges to search engines that a hyperlink should not affect the ranking of the link in any manner.  

Imagine you are writing news, and you want to link some portion of your writing to smaller pages that are not trustworthy. What you will do here is you will use a no-follow link that will inform Google that you do not recommend this.

It is evident backlinks are important in many ways. Your online credibility, integrity, and success depend on SEO, and backlinks are an important part of it.
In order to maximize results, make sure you hire SEO specialists who have proven track record of success or have done an SEO certification. Backlinks are the building blocks of your SEO and close attention should be paid to achieve the best results in search.

Good luck!