One of the ways to improve your website search results is to understand backlinks and how site owners can help each other to improve site reputation.
Search engines evaluate each website and assign a value they call “site reputation” which is based on a number of factors including content, speed and backlinks.
What is a backlink? This is where a site has a link to your site. What this means is someone found something on your site that they wanted to direct their own visitors to pay attention to. For example, if you’re a plastic surgeon and you post an article about liposuction, then another site focused on plastic surgery procedures can put a link to that article on their own site.
The interesting part is that search engines view that link as a message that someone found your content interesting enough to direct their own visitors to that article. Search engines track how many other sites have links to your content as a measure of how interesting and valuable your content is. In that way, your content is being judged by other sites and search engines.
Just like any person’s reputation, that reputation is based on what other people say about you. On the internet, your reputation is based on what other sites say about you. When they link to your site, they are saying your content is interesting and valuable. That increases your reputation.
Search engines also base the “value” of that link on the site reputation of the site that in linking back to your content. So, if a site like the National Institutes of Health links to an article on your site, search engines see that as a “high quality link”. That increases the reputation of your site.
Backlinks help every site. The more times your site is linked to, the more times your content is linked to, the more search engines will judge it as interesting and valuable. Lining back and forth between sites to share content is a great way of telling search engines like Google that the articles and information is worthy and should be shown in search results.
A backlink can be achieved by placing a link on a site that links to content on another site. This can be done by a developer putting the link in your code, it can be done by placing a link in an article that you post on your site, or it can be as simple as including the link in a blog post.
People should take the time to link to content on other sites that they feel is interesting and valuable. Those links help that site, but also help your own site.
