What is a Backlink and Why is It Important?

The SEO positioning of a website or blog requires a lot of SEO work on page and off page, and backlinks are part of that positioning strategy that we develop outside our page. Because what we are looking for is that there are links on other pages that point to ours.

This sends the message to Google that our content is good. So good that other websites decide to link to it and recommend it to their visitors. Consequently, it is one of the most important tools to climb positions in the results ranking.

What is a backlink and what is it for?

Understanding what a backlink is is much easier if we approach the term in Spanish. This is what we know as an inbound link or backlink. A link or backlink that, from a page, points directly to yours.

What are backlinks for? It depends on whether we look at it from the point of view of the user or Google. For users, the link takes them directly to another website where they can complete the information on the topic that interests them.

As for Google, the link helps you classify a content as more or less relevant. If a website with a good page rank within your sector links to your page, search engines will take this into account. In a way, the website you have linked to is telling Google that your page is good.

It's like looking for a job. It will be much easier to get the job you want if you go to the interview with a letter of recommendation from a relevant executive in the sector than if you only present yourself with your CV. And with positioning, exactly the same thing happens.

Why backlinks are very important in SEO

If you are fully immersed in the world of organic positioning, you already know that Google is never too clear when it comes to explaining what works well to gain positions. So those of us working on this have no choice but to use trial and error.

Luckily, there are so many people working in the world of Search Engine Optimization that among all of us we have been able to detect a series of good practices. That which we know that Google likes and that can take a direct page to the first position in the results ranking.

Among those good practices is having backlinks, hence the importance of getting links. Because, although it is possible to position a website without them, it has been shown that a website with a good number of incoming links can achieve better positioning results. It’s also equally important to have control on them, by checking and tracking backlinks with SEO tools.

As we said before, in terms of positioning, a link to your website is as if they were recommending you. If the page that recommends you has already earned the trust of Google, it will not doubt it and will consider that your site is of quality.

For this reason, it is not enough to get many backlinks, it is better to have less, but that these are of good quality, because they are the ones that will truly contribute to a better positioning.