If you're a business owner or run a company, you're certainly aware of the importance of appearing at the top of various search engine results. This helps reach potential customers and increase sales.

That's why some people work to improve their website's rankings solely by focusing on writing good content and using appropriate keywords. They forget the importance of relying on backlinks, which play a key role in your website's search engine ranking.

Thus, in this article, we'll learn about backlinks, their importance, and how to rely on them to boost your website's external SEO and ensure you appear in advanced search results.

What is meant by the term backlinks?
A backlink is a link from another website that points to your website. These links are considered trustworthy by search engines; the more backlinks your website has, the higher its trustworthiness.

For example, if a trusted website mentions your article and includes a backlink to it, this is a strong indicator of the quality of your content, in addition to ensuring you rank higher in search results.

The Relationship Between Backlinks and External SEO
Relying on backlinks for your website is one of the most important factors that directly impacts your website's ranking in search engine algorithms and your website's external SEO, especially on Google. This is due to several reasons, the most important of which are:

Increasing Domain Authority
The more links your website receives from other websites with high domain authority, the higher your website's domain authority will be. This contributes to increasing the likelihood of your website appearing in the first search results, as search engines consider websites with high domain authority more trustworthy. This contributes to strengthening your website's external SEO strategies.

Improving Keyword Rankings
Search engines understand your website's content and determine its relevance to searches through any backlinks linked to your website. When another website points to a specific page on your website using anchor text containing relevant keywords, this strengthens the page's relevance to those keywords. This improves the website's appearance in the first search results.

For example, if you have an article about "Best Off-Page SEO Strategies for Your Website" and you receive backlinks from other sites that use the anchor text "Best Off-Page SEO Strategies for Your Website," this will boost your article's ranking for those keywords.

Increase Organic Traffic
Backlinks not only boost your website's search engine ranking, but they also contribute to bringing direct traffic to your website. This happens when users click on any backlink that points to your website from another site. This traffic is known as "referral traffic." These visits are often high-quality, increasing the likelihood of users converting into customers.

Speed Up Discovery of New Content
Search engines use spiders or crawlers to discover new content and update their indexes. When another site points to any new page or content on your site using backlinks, this helps search engines discover those pages faster, which contributes to indexing the new content and ensuring it appears in search results.

Types of Backlinks
Dofollow Links
Are virtual backlinks used on most websites. These links help search engines confirm the trustworthiness of your site and its content, which leads to improved search engine visibility.

Nofollow Links
Unlike dofollow links, nofollow links don't significantly improve your site's search engine rankings. This is because they are not highly trustworthy, and are typically links that come from blog comments or purchased advertising links.

However, they still have limited value, as they diversify your site's backlink portfolio and can sometimes bring direct traffic to your site.

Strategies for Building Strong Backlinks for Your Website
Create High-Quality Content
Write content that helps attract customers by understanding what your target audience is searching for and what their interests are. Make sure your content includes case studies, figures, and trusted sources. This will entice other sites to link to it and improve your site's off-page SEO strategy.

Guest Blogging
You can write valuable articles for other websites in your niche, which can help you gain backlinks to your site. However, make sure to choose relevant and high-authority sites.

Broken Link Building
Broken links are links that lead to nonexistent or deleted pages. Therefore, you should contact sites that have broken links to your site to work on replacing them with other backlinks that point to the same content.

Branding Without a Link
Use web monitoring tools to find sites that mention your brand name or any of your products, but do not have backlinks to them. Start contacting the owners of these sites to include backlinks to your site with your brand.

Competitive Analysis
You can use SEO tools to improve your off-site SEO strategy by analyzing your competitors' backlinks. This will help you understand who is linking to them, creating new opportunities to build your own backlinks and boost your competition.

Local and Industry Directories
Register your website in local and industry directories relevant to your niche. This helps build trust, build backlinks with other sites, and improve your chances of appearing in search engines.