What are Backlinks? Understanding Backlinks and their Importance for SEO
Let me tell you a short story about this somewhat popular company, Backrub. You might've heard about it and probably use its services at least once, but likely several times daily.
The Backrub story is, well, not interesting, but I'll say it anyway. It began when a Ph.D. student at Stanford University was searching for an idea for a dissertation theme in the mid-to-late 90s. The original idea was to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web. Then it changed to finding web pages that link to others based on the consideration that they contain valuable information about the page.
One thing led to another, and Backrub has become one of the most valuable companies in the world today.
Oh, I might've unwittingly skipped the part where they rebranded to Google somewhere along the way.
Backlinks laid Google’s foundation, and even though Google uses a combination of ranking factors today, according to a Backlinko study, backlinks remain a key ranking signal in search results.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are simply links from one website to another. They are also referred to as incoming, referral, or inbound links. If you link to another website, they have a backlink from you. If another website links to yours, you have a backlink from them.
For example, these words link to YouTube, so they now have a backlink from us.
I got you, didn't I?
How Backlinks Work
A simple analogy can help illustrate how backlinks work.
If ten random people recommend Maureen for a friend and three recommend Michael, there must be something good about Maureen, and I should probably hang out with her. But, if two close friends recommend Michael and ten random people recommend Maureen, the close-friends recommendations carry more weight.
In this analogy, the close friends are trustworthy, high-authority sites with a stellar reputation, and the random people are low to moderate authority sites. Michael and Maureen represent other websites.
That is sort of how backlinks work. The more the backlinks to a page and the higher their quality, the more valuable the page is perceived.
Why are Backlinks Important?
Because search engines say so, that's why.
Most of us get our traffic from search engines and specifically Google. So, when they tell us they are using backlinks as a key ranking factor, we burn the midnight oil to create the best backlinking strategy.
Backlinks help with three main things, which are:
1. Rankings
As mentioned, search engines use backlinks as votes of confidence. The more votes of confidence a web page has, the higher they rank for relevant search queries.
2. Discoverability
Search engines often find new good content by regularly revisiting pages they've already crawled to check for new links. The more the links from these reputable sites, the more pages in your website are linked, and the faster they are linked.
3. Referral traffic
Besides improving your ranking on search engine results, backlinking can be the source of direct traffic.
You get referral traffic when someone clicks the link to your page from another site. Backlinking can be incredibly effective at bringing in referral traffic if you get a reputable site to backlink to you.
In short, backlinks are perfect for increasing traffic to your website.
Types of backlinks
The two types of backlinks are follow and nofollow backlinks. As the name suggests, follow backlinks affect your rankings, while nofollow links don't. However, Google was planning to evolve the nofollow attribute. Nofollow links from reputable high-authority websites can still be beneficial to your SEO.
This posts goes into the nitty gritty details of backlink types.
What Makes a Good Backlink?
Not all backlinks have the same value. Some have a more positive effect on your page's rank, others have a negative effect, and others are neutral. Here are the influencers of backlink value to help you develop an effective backlinking strategy.
- Follow vs. Nofollow backlinks: Follow backlinks are more desirable and valuable than nofollow backlinks.
- Page authority: The higher the domain authority of the linking website, the higher the backlink's value. Avoid backlinks from spammy and low-quality websites.
- Link relevancy: A gear shop linking to a bakery reduces the relevancy of the backlink, lowering its value.
- Link location: Where the link is positioned matters. If it's in the footer, it is not perceived as valuable as if it's at the top of the page.
- Link number: A backlink from a page with a few links is more valuable than one from a page with hundreds or thousands of links.
- Anchor text: Some anchor texts are more SEO-friendly and will add value to the backlink.
Now that you understand what makes good backlinks, how do you get them?
How to Get Good Backlinks
To get more backlinks to your website, you can either earn, create, or build them.
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Earning backlinks
Most content publishers only link to reputable sources to give their readers facts and reliable sources of information. So, to earn backlinks, you need to create high-quality content that your readers will share or choose to link to from their websites.
Organic backlinks are effective in the long term.
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Creating backlinks
Creating backlinks involves manually adding links to your site on another website, such as business directories, replying to forum threads, and leaving blog comments. It is effective but effort-intensive and takes time. However, many self-created backlinks tend toward black hat SEO tactics that could affect your search result rank.
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Building backlinks
Building backlinks involves reaching out to site editors, owners, bloggers, etc., and asking them to link to your site. It isn't easy, as you are trying to convince someone that they can improve a webpage on their site by linking to your site.
How do you present your value to them? Using the link-building tactics below:
1. Guest blogging
Guest blogging is writing one-off posts on another website and linking back to yours. The website should be related to your brand or to the content you are writing.
2. Broken link building
Broken link building is finding relevant dead links to other sites, then reaching out to the author and suggesting they link to yours instead. There several broken link checker tools you can use online.
3. Investigate competitor backlinks
It is a zero-sum game. If you win, your competitors lose, and vice versa.
That is why you should have as much information about your competitors to know what new tactics they're using before they win and you lose. Backlinks are no exception.
Research your competitors to know which sites are linking to them. If they are linking to your competitors, chances are, they can agree to link back to you if you offer more value. Reach out to them and present your pitch. They could agree.
4. The Skyscraper technique
This technique involves finding relevant content with lots of backlinks, creating something better, then reaching out to the people who linked to the original to link to yours instead.
You could pull it off, but more often than not, you need the services of a professional writer to guarantee success.
5. Unlinked mentions
This involves looking for content that mentions your name without linking you, then asking your author to add a link to make them clickable.
Backlinking is Critical to All SEO Campaigns
Backlinks are treated by search engines as votes of confidence, playing a critical role in a page's rank. That is why no SEO strategy is complete if it doesn't comprise a backlinking strategy. But backlinking can be incredibly difficult, with the various strategies and methods to incorporate into your backlinking strategy.
That is why you shouldn't handle it all yourself; you need help with the most effort and time-intensive parts.
For example, you stick to broken link building and unlinked mentions and leave professional writers to create quality content, guest blog, and deploy the Skyscraper Technique. It is the only way to fully implement a backlinking strategy without burning out and breaking the bank.
Hire Professional Writers to Build High-Quality Backlinks
Depending on your content needs and the size of your company, you can either hire an in-house, full time content writer or outsource content writing projects to a professional content writer.
While an in-house, full-time writer will always be available, there are several costs involved, including recruitment costs, salaries, taxes, benefits, etc. The cost-effective alternative to having a full-time writer is outsourcing content writing projects to a professional content writing agency like Zoey Writers.
We are a content writing agency with a qualified team of professional content writers who have years of experience creating all types of content. Our writers can strike a perfect balance between SEO and quality content writing, which can help you establish an online presence that captures your target audience’s attention.
Besides crafting valuable content that showcases you as expert in your industry, our content writers will write to engage, inform, and motivate your target audience to act. Moreover, their in-depth SEO knowledge will be invaluable in your backlink-building strategy.
Contact us today to discuss your content needs and to learn how our content writing services can help bolster your business.
Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash. Thank you Myriam!
