“Backlink” and “Link Building” are the two terms that are frequently used by the Search engine Specialists.
If you are on the journey of ranking your website or blog, you will hear the term backlinks a lot more every day.
I will take you on the journey of backlinks through this post, where you will not only learn the term but also know how to utilize the knowledge.
What is Backlink in SEO?
In simple words, a backlink means another website mentioning your link on their web page.
It is said that a big part of SEO ranking is a backlink. And it is true that it plays a major role in ranking the websites as it builds more trust.
I have spoken about backlink and link building quite a lot in other posts and how it is beneficial to rank the website. It’s a major part of Off-Page SEO techniques.
2 Types of Backlinks
Before we dive into backlinks, it is important to talk about the term link juice. When a website links to your homepage or any article from your website, it passes link juice. They are important to rank your websites and articles and in return also increase your domain and page authority.
1. Do-Follow Link
When you put a link on a website to another webpage it passes link juice and increases the credibility of any webpage. As a blogger, when you post any link to your site, you are passing a link juice to that webpage. You can stop passing those link juice to external websites you link to, by using a no-follow tag.
2. No-follow Link
No-follow links are not that useful for the webpages. It doesn’t pass any link juice nor increase the domain authority or contribute to anything. No-follow links are mostly given to sites that are not reliable. For example, some websites allow comments on blog posts, when you type a comment, it may or may not go to moderation. If it goes on moderation, and as a commenter, you type your website on details which has nothing to do with the post, the author may remove the website or not post the comment at all or give you a no-follow link.
| Backlinks Glossary | |
| High-Quality Links | Links that come from high domain authority sites. It increases the trust in your website and can bring tons of high-quality converting traffic. |
| Low-Quality Links | Links that come from low-quality websites, which has got nothing to do with your website or blogs. It can come from spam and automated websites or buying links in bulk from different platforms cheaply. |
| Anchor Text | A particular keyword in the blog post used to link to another website is called anchor text. |
| Internal Links | Links that point to your own web page or blog posts from the same domain are Internal Links. |
| External Links | Links that point to another webpage are called external links. |
| Root Domains Linking | When you have a number of backlinks that comes from one domain it is root domain linking. However, no matter how many times that one domain links to your site, it is considered one linked root domain. |
Importance of Backlinks in SEO
As I already mentioned, backlinks help you build the authority of your domain and hence recognize you as a credible source for the information and ranks your website on search engine.
It is a fact that it passes link juice to your website, and many SEO especially beginners fall into the trap of building hundreds of backlinks.
There was a time when the ranking used to be easier with any kind of link, whether it is high quality or low-quality links. As time progressed, Google rolled out different algorithm changes for different things. Similarly, for stopping low-quality backlinks to rank the site it rolled out the Google Penguin algorithm. The algorithm changed a lot in the SEO world.
There was a concept of black hat, white hat, and grey hat SEO. It still exists, but much black hat SEO does not work for keyword ranking these days. For some, it may work, but it will not last long.
Having a backlink from a credible website is important and should match your niche. For example, a website that talks about dogs should have a link from a dog-related site and not from birds related sites unless there is any relevance to the post.
1. Search Engine Ranking
Backlinks are one of the key factors of off-page optimization for search engine rankings organically.
For example, if you go to Semrush or any other SEO tools and do keyword analysis, it shows the number of sites ranking on that keyword. You will also get to know how many backlinks those pages have to reach that position.
Having a link from another website, will only build trust in your site and naturally help you rank higher in search engines.
2. Tons of Referral Traffic
When someone links your page, a true reader will like to click on the hyperlink on the post. If that link is yours, you will start getting traffic from that website.
If the link is coming from a niche-related website, the bounce rate is low and people are less likely to leave your website quickly. It is because your website itself may have other topics the audience was searching for.
3. Quick Indexing on Search Engine
Search engines like Google and Bing have bots that recognize any new web pages on your domain. It takes some time for the bots to crawl your new page and index them faster on search engines. That is why we can manually go to the search console and request to index faster.
However, when many websites are linking your page, this helps search engines to recognize your site faster and indexing is also going to take place a little quicker.
How to Get Quality Backlinks in SEO
As important as it is to get backlinks, a high-quality backlink is always preferred. It is not about the quantity but the quality of your work. As mentioned before, a spammy website or a spammy backlink will always put you down in the rankings.
1. Create Great Content
When you buy a product and you like it so much, you will automatically recommend the product to your friends and family.
Similarly, when you create great content and solve people’s issues, the readers are bound to share your content on their feed or give you a link on their website.
Try solving people’s problems and do a good on-page SEO and off-page SEO, it will be easier to get backlinks and rank organically.
2. Guest Blogging
When you write articles for others in your niche, it is called guest blogging.
As an author, you may think that I would like to post on that topic on my website, why would I give content for free to others. It is normal to have such thoughts. So you can always create something for your site and something for others so you can interlink each other. All the bloggers may not be okay with such thoughts, so you may have to negotiate what kind of link they are okay to give you.
It can be a daunting task to find a website where you can do guest blogging.
Here’s a simple trick to find the blogs that accept guest blogging.
On Google or search engine of your choice, type:
- [your_topic] “write for us”
- [your_topic] “guest post”
- [your_topic] “guest article”
- [your_topic] “inurl:contribute”
Now, you can simply go to each result and contact the blog owners and make your pitch to publish your article as a guest author.
3. Broken Link Building Technique
Over the years, a lot of web pages change, move, or are deleted for some reason. Your task is to find out those pages and links.
The strategy is to find those links, recreate content that was previously there on that link, and reach out to the people who have previously linked to those sites.
Now, the question is how do I do that?
Go to the Ahrefs, Site Explorer page, now go to the best pages by Incoming Links and use the filter “HTTP 404 not found” which means the page does not exist anymore.
Click on those links and go to the Wayback machine, enter the URL to check what was written on that URL. All you have to do is, recreate the content and tell the webpages that link to your site that the URL is dead, and add your webpage to that article.
4. Get your Competitor’s Backlinks
When your website is new, you do not have any backlinks. However, your competitors have hundreds of backlinks which you can take to your advantage.
If you use Semrush, click on Keyword Gap, and fill in the URL of the website and your competitor’s website. You can get an overview of websites linking to others’ websites but not yours.
Now, send an email to those website owners and see if you can get those links. This can be quite time-consuming but it can be worth the time and effort you put into it.
I hope this article helped you understand what is backlinks in SEO and how to acquire backlinks?