The Importance of Backlinks

In the hustle and bustle of the internet, sometimes people don’t understand all of the technological terms, and thus the concept of backlinks, or links back to your website, is not understood. First, a brief overview: the “Internet” is the physical hardware, the software, and the protocols (HTTP, FTP, HTML, CSS, etc.) that make up the content that we access when we fire up a web browser. The “Web,” or “World Wide Web” (www) is the network of hyperlinks that connects all of the different sites on the internet together.

Let’s imagine the “Internet” as the shopping malls, housing developments, and other establishments (e.g. churches, banks, government buildings) that people need to access. Now, the “Web” is the network of roads that connect the different physical locations. Without the roads, people couldn’t find or access the locations. In the same way, without the hyperlinks that constitute the “Web,” people wouldn’t be able to find your website.

Going one step further, search engines like Google rely on “spiders,” or computer scripts that crawl the “Web” to find new websites, updated content, and other relevant data in order to index it and serve it up to visitors searching at their home page. So, for instance, if you bought a new domain and created a new website, Google wouldn’t know that it even existed. One recent report says that it would take Google’s spiders almost a month to stumble across your website! That’s a long time on the internet, and to quote a popular meme, “Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat!”

So, that brings us to the importance of backlinks. Backlinks are links from other sites back to your site. What that does is makes it easier for Google’s spiders to find and index your website. Backlinks are SEO gold: that’s why there are armies of spammers trolling the internet to find unprotected blogs to leave comments on. If you have links going to a website, Google can find that site easier as they crawl your site.

More importantly, however, is that Google considers both the quantity and the quality of backlinks when ranking your site in search results. There are many different things that are considered when ranking search results, but having other churches link to you from their websites is a big help.

By the same token, a simple, free way to help KJV Churches is to link to us from your website. In fact, you could link directly to your KJV Churches listing from your church website, which would improve both the search relevance of your listing page, and would create more traffic back to your site.

Having a website is all well and good, and necessary, but there are many things to consider, and links both from and back to your website are very important. Stack the deck in your favor by linking to high-quality websites, and having other sites link to you, and your search ranking will improve as your SEO relevance rises.