Hats off: If you want to use our Article series so far, you are already an experienced adventurer! The SEO treasure hunt has revealed many secrets of search engine optimisation to you. Slowly, it's time to return to your home garden. Here you can now apply your learned knowledge to make your homepage shine! Your neighbours will admire your rich garden and tell others about the beautiful flowers you have growing there! Take advantage of the attention, because good neighbours ensure sustainable SEO success. How - read here - as well as in the summary at the end of the article.
Maintain your good reputation - with "backlinks"
An external link that leads from another website to your own homepage is very valuable. In SEO language, these links are called "backlinks". They give search engines the signal that your homepage is particularly recommendable. SEO backlinks can improve your results in search engines. However, it is also important which website mentions you. Because the recommendation is considered particularly valuable if this foreign website has a high reputation with Google & Co. For example, if you are linked by a recognised online magazine in your industry, this is a great backlink for SEO.
Beware of bad neighbours
Unfortunately, not every backlink is good. On the other hand, SEO backlinks can even be negative if they are so-called "bad neighbourhood". This includes sites that Google itself considers to be dubious. Search engines have such sites on their radar because they attract negative attention, for example, through paid link recommendations, poor quality content or copyright infringements.
You can always check yourself which websites you mention. There are free programmes for this purpose such as the Backlink Checker from ubersuggest. Here you get an overview of all the websites you link to. You also get indications whether search engines consider this page to be unserious (spam).
Make sure you have a seamless network
If you get a good backlink, the linked page will be rewarded as well as all the sub-pages associated with it. This is where the hard work pays off if you are responsible for a Clean internal link structure have taken care of! An example: A website visitor likes your article on the topic of garden gnomes. Great, then show him immediately where similar articles can be found. This way you not only increase the chance that interested readers will stay longer on your homepage and browse through more articles. Quite automatically, the linked pages benefit from the appreciation through the backlink. This is because the originally visited page passes on part of the authority it has gained to the internally linked pages.
In a nutshell:
- Backlinks show search engines that your homepage is trustworthy
- If a reputable website links you, that is particularly valuable
- The enhancement through a backlink is propagated to all internally linked pages
- Links from spam sites damage the reputation of your website
- Check your backlinks regularly with SEO tools
You can find more articles on SEO backlinks here:
https://de.semrush.com/blog/linkbuilding/
https://yoast.com/tag/link-building/
