Backlinks are links from a website that point to a page on your own website. They are likely to point to content on your website that is worth citing (such as an original article or research) or simply an interesting product or service that the original website recommends.
Backlinks are one of the major influences on a web page’s page rank. They show that the content on that page is authoritative and trustworthy, which is a sign to Google’s crawling bots that the webpage deserves to be promoted and seen by more people on its search engine results pages.
It’s also the case that backlinks can improve a webpage’s ranking for certain keywords. Google’s bots only know why a page is being linked to by examining the text highlighted by the hyperlink. For instance, if another website is linking to your webpage about men’s shoes, with the keywords “men’s shoes” highlighted by the hyperlink, Google will know that your page is an authoritative source for content on men’s shoes.
The upshot of this is that websites that are attempting to enhance their technical SEO should consider contacting websites that link to them, asking them to refine the anchor text of their hyperlinks. Affiliate marketing, which involves paying other websites to promote your webpages, should also be conducted with backlink keyword efficiency in mind.
