The Internet has explosively grown in size and power in the last few decades, and as with any industry, there is money to be made, and companies big and small cannot afford to ignore the Internet and its many services and connections. In today’s ultra-connected world, making use of a backlink profile is essential, and business can grow or wither based on such things.
What Are Backlinks?
Put simply, a backlink is any website link that leads to a company’s or person’s website from a different website. While browsing one web site, links to other web sites can appear in text, and clicking them will bring the user to that intended web site. Web design and SEO services must keep this in mind, and to optimize your site, backlinks cannot be ignored.
How Backlinks Came to Be
According to Post Modern Marketing, early Internet search engines functioned differently than they did today in the 1990s. SEO tech was based on keywords, and this meant that websites irrelevant to a search could appear, just because the keyword appears somewhere in the web site’s text. Even worse was the exploitation of this system. Some web design was based on cramming as many keywords, or many iterations of one keyword, into a website and therefore giving it priority in a web search.
This changed when two Stanford students devised a new system called PageRank. Backlink profiles emerged upon this system’s development. Now, SEO tech changed to focus on backlinks on various web sites. If many web sites have backlinks to a particular web site, then that destination web site was likely to be high quality and desirable. This bypassed the keyword issue and sorted search engine results by web site popularity based on a backlink profile. An SEO agency must keep this in mind nowadays, with these new rules to the game.
The Business of An SEO Agency
Today, web searched have a lot of power, and businesses must tap into it or face disaster. For example, research shows that the first organic search result on Google will draw in 32.5% of the traffic share on average, and all websites on the first page of a Google search claim 91.5% of the traffic share, on average. SEO services have not failed to notice this; content marketing is “highly integrated” in the SEO strategy of 45% of all companies, and that means a good backlink profile. What is more, mobile device searches often involve “near me,” because mobile users often perform Internet searches for business and services, from dining to auto repair to movie theaters. A business could sink or swim based on their ability to appear early and often in those searches.
Internet users are also picky about the web sites they visit, and this is one more thing to keep in mind. Just the appearance of a web site has power, because according to a report, around 38% of Internet users won’t interact with a web site that has an ugly layout, and 39% of site guests will leave if images fail to load. A good backlink profile is clearly just one of several factors for web design to juggle, and in the Information Age, web sites are not just useful; they may be thought of as public areas or hotels online, and no one would want to stay at a hideous hotel. Today’s Internet guests want the best service, and an SEO agency has its work cut out for it with this consumer base on hand.