What are Backlinks?
Backlinks? What are these mysterious links and what possible use could they have for your hotel website? Well, the short answer is a lot! If you aren’t already, backlinks are certainly worth investing some of your time and can help you to drum up a large number of organic new users through to your website. Backlinks also are known as “inbound links” or “incoming links” and are responsible for linking any users from one site to another. Backlinks are extremely useful for optimising and improving your own SEO standpoint, helping to push websites up the search rankings, as a site that has multiple links pushing users through to your website is automatically seen as a more reliable source to one that is not, giving your website extra credibility and kudos in the eyes of the “mighty” search engines.
Why are backlinks important?
As touched on above, backlinks are highly valuable from an SEO standpoint and can help your website to rank higher up the organic search rankings, as having multiple backlinks represents a “vote of confidence” that search engines take extremely seriously. Take the real-life example of choosing to go to new to a new restaurant based on recommendations from your close friends. Backlinking in its basic form is the same sort of thing; it is taking a digital vote of confidence from other quality websites.
Earning and giving backlinks
Earning and establishing quality backlinks, also known as “link earning” or “link building” can take some time and will require you to build up strong relationships with the websites you are looking to be linked from. It is important to remember that some backlinks are inherently more valuable than others (in the same way that certain recommendations from friends are worth more than others!). Backlinks from popular and well-known, high authority websites are deemed more desirable and carry more influence than from low authority spammy sites. Backlinks from such websites can have a negative effect on the website authority, with most major search engines stripping website authority for poor backlinks.
How to check your current backlink performance?
Before making a start of building new quality backlinks through to your website, it is important to understand exactly how much work has been done already. Without knowing, you may already have a number of external websites linking through to your website. Fortunately, there are many tools available (for free) which allow you to view and maintain your current backlinks. A full list of worthy backlink checkers can be found below:
How to get new backlinks?
How convenient! A very well placed (internal) backlink is exactly what is needed here! Take a look at our full blog outlining the best ways to obtain new quality backlinks.