Why Links are Important

Finding quality links to your website is the most important job for something doing SEO. Without quality backlinks, you will not rank high in any search engine. They simply won’t know if you are important or what your website is about.

Think of search engines like high school. The most popular people always had a lot of friends. The top websites on the web have a lot of links pointing to them.

This is also like social proof. Social proof is the idea that if everyone else is doing it, it must be good. If all the girls are talking to one guy at a bar, he must be worth talking to. If everyone is drinking coke, it must be worth drinking. If all the websites are pointing to one website, it must be worth ranking.

Search engines determine how to rank people by the number and quality of the links that point to you. It’s based on an idea similar to academic papers. If everyone is citing “Mary’s Book on History” in their reference section, Mary’s Books must be the authoritative source on history. If 99% of people site John’s Book on History, it must be the 2nd most authoritative source on history and so forth down the line.

That’s how Google ranks you. If everyone points a link towards me for SEO, then I must be the best place for SEO on the web. There is a bit more too it in terms of keywords and quality of the links. It’s not a simple numbers game- if I have better links that you, I can have less links and rank higher than you. We’ll get into more detail later about this but the point here is that links count. Without links, search engines won’t find you on the web, they won’t index your pages, and they’ll think your that loser band kid from school and won’t associate with you.

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