It will not be anything new to say that search rankings are reasons why SEO exist.  Every website is trying hard to a find place on the first page of search rankings with the ultimate goal of breaking into the top ten. The best way of achieving the goal is to send out the right signals to Google by building a healthy backlink profile, which is one of the four most important signals that Google uses for determining search ranks.  Backlinks have remained the backbone of SEO campaigns that has not changed during the evolution of SEO. Backlinks were important in the early stages of SEO, and even today, it maintains the same importance. Every backlink your website earns is a vote in its favour that underlines its good quality that carries much weight to search engines.

When others think well about your website, they demonstrate it by willing to connect with you by sharing links.  When you earn a link, Google treats it as an endorsement of the good quality of content that attracted others. Since some people have liked to the content, it would find some more takers from among the target audience. This would help them to do what they need to do.  For Google, when all things are equal, the quality of backlinks makes the real difference in earning good ranks. More quality backlinks you have in your kitty, higher will be the prospects of reaching the top of the search results page. However, the quality of backlinks becomes the real differentiator because ordinary links would take you nowhere.  In this article, we will discuss the factors that determine the quality of backlinks and what it means to you.

What makes a high-quality backlink?

Not all backlinks are equal. Some might be completely inert to search engines while some others can have adverse effects on SEO. For making a positive impact on SEO, you need only good quality links that sent out positive signals to search engines. The quality of backlinks is so much subjective that what SEO Mombasa thinks about it would be quite different from the way others perceive it.  However, if backlinks originate from a relevant source that is also trusted, demonstrates good authority in its niche and the source is topically relevant, you can be sure about its good quality. There are other factors too, like PageRank, non-reciprocal, organically acquired, etc. but relevance and authority are the most important ones.

Know if the link is authoritative

When you acquire a link, the first thing to look for is whether it is authoritative. If the link comes from some reputed review sites and news sites or an industry-leading website, it is obviously an authoritative link. There is no need to dig deep to find it out when Wall Street Journal or Forbes send out links. However, there are trustworthy sources in niche areas, lesser-known but contribute good value in the field that demonstrates good authority. You can verify these sources by using a few techniques.

• Judge the quality of the website to ensure that it is a legitimate one and there are no typographical or grammatical mistakes in the content.  Check if there is some correlation between the topics. It would demonstrate that there are some focus and objectivity in creating content.
• If you feel it is worthwhile to link to the website, others too must have already done it. Judge is the other links have affiliate codes or mostly no follow links. If a link from this website directs to your website would you find it quite matching with your outlook about acquiring links?
• Using a third-party tool can help to check backlinks and evaluate its worth because a little less authority or not having enough citations does not always demean the quality of links.

Judge the relevance and topicality

There must be something in common between your website and the one that offers links, especially in the business offerings.  If your business is for gardening equipment, you can invite links from websites that focus on landscaping where gardening equipment is used. When there is some matching, then the content used on the websites would be meaningful for the audience. Study the content to determine if the topics link to each other in some meaningful manner. It would show some amount of objectivity in content creation that moves in a specific direction.  Look at the reviews of the website to judge its legitimacy and how much positive response it receives. If there were too much negativity, it would overrule the relevance factor.

Instead of too much emphasis on link quality, consider if there is enough similarity in customer profile between the websites with some relevant content and decent link quality because that is what can work wonders for your SEO campaign.