SEO Basics: Why Do Links Matter For SEO – Rapid Immersion #7

Why do links matter for SEO, if you’re new to the world of SEO and are exploring the topic of link, building or link acquisition, or, if you’ve been doing SEO for quite some time and are looking for a quick refresher? This article is for you to start out: let’s clarify what a link is in the context we’re talking about today, as it’s always good to review the fundamentals.

A link also commonly called a backlink inbound link or an inward link, is an incoming hyper link from one web page to another website. It’s, for example, if you have a website, your web site com, and I have a website reef, digital combo, you and I decided to place a link to your website on reef digital comdata. You for our visitors to visit. You with you, have received a link. So, generally speaking, this would be a good news for you, as your website now has extra exposure and will restart and will start receiving visitors who have been referred to you from reef beyond this, though, the presence of this link can also benefit your rankings in search Results leading to even more visitors finding your site, but why does the presence of this link impact your SEO? The best answer starts with exploring how search engines use and depend on links to function so to explain.

Let’s look at the big picture of what a search engine does. Okay, the first thing it does is: is it navigates or crawls the web to discover content? It then indexes this content. In large databases, it calculates the relevancy and the meaning of the content. It ranks the content versus other items available in the database and then finally, it serves as results in milliseconds when we request it by performing a search as the Internet is a big and ever-changing place.

Search engines need a lot of computing power mesh with smart software to do these tasks on a 24 hour a day, seven days a week basis and as the scope of the challenge is way beyond what a person or team of people could do manually. The engineers at search engines have looked to develop machine learning methods to try and keep up one way, they’ve done. This is by using algorithms an algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations and problem-solving situations.

These algorithms are at the very heart of what makes a search engine good or bad at answering. Our queries in the early days of the web search engines used links as a primary method of discovering new content. The search engine did this by starting at one side. Let’s say, for example, the New York Times then following each link it encountered as it navigated through content the search engine software often called a bot or a spider, would travel from link to link to link finding new information to serve up for searchers back.

Then, if you had a website and wanted it to appear in search engines, you needed to be linked to from a website that a search engine already knew about or you’d risk. Your site never being found. Now for google links play a particularly important role in their story beyond using links to discover content, the founders of google made two very important observations that would go on to establish their search engine as the best in the market.

The first observation was that online some webpages have far more links than others, and the second observation, these frequently linked to pages, tend to be superior resources. This thinking was simple, but revolutionary links providing a strong signal about the value of a web page. A link from one website to another could be likened to an endorsement or a vote for that website. From an SEO perspective and as Google was already crawling the web at length to discover content, it was able to easily see which pages were the most link to so that it could then prioritize that content for a person who was searching, which is really brilliant.

So fast forward to today and search engine algorithms are now better than ever at measuring links and assigning ranking power on a case by case basis. Now one link can be worth several hundred or even several thousand times the value of another, so modern SEO. Practitioners are tasked with identifying and then earning links that search engines regard the most, which is what makes SEO as much of an art as it is a science.

Well, that about wraps up this introduction to why links matter for SEO in the next article we’ll be going into more detail about how to evaluate the SEO value of a link on a case by case basis. So you can inspect the links to your own site or to that of a competitor site and better understand why a particular web page is or isn’t ranking in the text accompanying. This post you’ll also find links to some of our favorite tools to help you conduct this analysis, so thank you very much for your time and all the best have a great day.

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