How Many Backlinks Do You Need?

Everybody knows that backlinks are the cornerstone of SEO. They’re what tell search engines that your site is important and worth reporting in search results.

Backlinks have been around since the very start of effective internet search engines at the end of the 1990s. Intelligent internet pioneers like Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized that you could create an algorithm that could count the number of links to a particular page, and that this fact could be used to judge that page’s relevance. Since then, the sophistication of the ranking algorithms has changed significantly. But with that said, backlinks still provide the backbone of most company’s SEO strategy.

With that said, how many do you need? The short answer is that it depends.

Source Strength

anchor links

To begin with, when the internet was young, a backlink was a backlink. In other words, if a page linked to your website, it didn’t really matter where it came from. But with progressive alterations to search, that all began to change. Search engines like Google realized that some links were more valuable than others and that those links should be more highly valued. A link from Forbes.com, for instance, is far more beneficial to a website’s ranking than a link from a coupon website. Thus, it’s not so much about the quality of your backlinks, but from where they come. A single backlink from a top online news outlet could be worth a hundred times more than one from an unregistered source.

The Delay

According to websitepromoter.co.uk, SEO provides a high return on investment. But what many entrepreneurs don’t realize is that there can be a significant delay between the implementation of an SEO strategy, and its effect on the internet. This is because it takes time for Google’s algorithms to crawl all of the links on the web and update its results. Some simple advice: SEO requires patience.

Target Page

No link links to a whole website. Instead, each external link sends users directly to a particular page. As a result, some of your pages can rank higher than others in search results, although any links to any of your pages will help boost your overall domain authority.

It’s worth noting that if you do focus your links – for instance, linking users to a high-quality post – then that post will rise faster through the rankings. This might be a good strategy if you know that the quality of posts on your site varies dramatically.

Anchor Texts

The text in the link to your site used to be very important. Keywords in the text that were associated with your site helped it rank higher for certain search terms. Since the early days, major search engines like Google and Bing, have updated how their relevance functions work. Although anchor text is not as important as it once was, it still plays a role. Keeping your off-site links consistent with your onsite message helps to build online trust, allowing you to improve your SEO much faster.

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