The Importance of Backlinks
There is a lot of speculation surrounding how Google chooses to rank sites, but one thing is for sure: it involves the use of backlinks. Here we are covering what backlinks are, why they’re important, and how you can get more for your site.

What are backlinks?
You can think of backlinks like your blue check on twitter or your account verification on Instagram. They’re pretty important for verifying your website. In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. There are two types of backlinks - internal and external. Internal links come from within your own website like linking to another tab on your website from within a blog post. External links or off-page SEO come from other sources like Pinterest.
Why are backlinks important?
You want to get backlinks anyway you can. Backlinks have a positive effect on a site's ranking position (also called domain authority) and search visibility. When you’re able to get backlinks from other website owners, you’re completing a process called link building. The more link building that you take part in, the better chance you have of someone navigating to your website. According to a MOZ search engine ranking factors study, off-site SEO likely carries more than 50% of the ranking factor weight.
How do you get backlinks?
While there are three types of backlinks, natural and manually built links are the two most sought after. Self-created links are typically easier to achieve, making them less desirable to Google. These self-created links are made when you do things like add your website link to your email signature. Natural and manually built links are two that you have to put a real effort in to receive.
Natural links occur when you have high quality content. Say a blogger writes a post about their favorite summer outfits and links your business for where they picked up their photography backdrops. This backlink to your business in their blog post would be considered a natural link. Offering SEO optimized content that is up to date with the trends is the best way to be given natural backlinks.
Manually built backlinks are a marketing tool. When you hire an influencer to share your product on social media and link back to the product on your website, that creates a manual built backlink. You can also offer to write reviews for another company and request they include a backlink to your site, register your site on business listing pages, or sponsor a blog article another website. Wild Optix Designs has the tools to identify target backlink opportunities for clients. We take the stress out of increasing your brand’s domain authority and grow your presence all at the same time. Investing in a good marketing company is one of the best things you can do for your business.
When it comes to backlink building, you need to be willing to put in the effort to play the game. Google takes time to index sites, so you won’t see your domain authority jump 10 points overnight. There are still other factors surrounding domain authority scores like website age and traffic that take time to acquire and be accounted for.