You may have noticed that I haven’t touched on off page SEO yet here in my blog. My previous posts have mostly been focused on on-page SEO.

And I have very good reason for that. On-page SEO, in a matter of speaking, focuses on developing and improving the product – your website, or your webpage to be more precise. If you do not have a very good product, no matter how much you try to promote it, people will simply not buy it.

Off Page SEO Is Promoting Your Website

Which brings us now to off page SEO backlinks – the science of promoting the product, I mean your webpage.

Backlinks are, simply put, links from other webpages to your webpage.

And in a sense, it is really very similar to promoting your product – your webpage – for the rest of the world wide web to see.

Off page SEO backlinks have often been described as votes to your site as viewed by Google. When Google spiders the different webpages of the Internet, it tracks these backlinks that are directed towards your webpages and counts them as votes for your webpage.

So, effectively, the more backlinks you have, the more votes your webpage has.

And the more popular your webpage is, the higher you shall rank in the SERPs.

Therefore, the more backlinks you have, the higher you shall rank in Google searches, right?

Not necessarily.

What?!

Coz there is such a thing as the quality of backlinks.

Quality SEO Backlinks Carry More Weight

Let me explain that in the form of an analogy.

If you were sick and you need medication for you to get well, which medication would you take? The one recommended by both your plumber and your electrician? Or the one your most trusted doctor prescribes to you?

The keyword that we are driving at here is authority.

Quality backlinks come from websites that have authority. And one vote from an authority website carries more weight than a combined multiple votes from websites with lesser authority.

Generally, .edu and .gov websites carry much authority that a backlink from any of these sites is a major plus for any webpage.

Additionally, if you get a backlink from a website like CNN.com, aside from the traffic that would obviously generated by that link coming from CNN visitors, the link gives your webpage a very authoritative vote.

So, to sum it all up in this primer about off page SEO backlinks, although you need a very good website that is fully optimized with its on page factors, backlinks may be the determining factor that can catapult it high in Google rankings. And the quality of your SEO backlinks can be determined by the authority of the webpages that your backlinks come from.