If you’re new to the world of Internet marketing, you’re probably wondering what’s all the hype about SEO backlinks: what are they? Where can you find them? What do they mean for your website?
One of the main things that search engines like to look at when they are ranking sites for their search is the number of backlinks. The more links that a site has, the higher the ranking that site is given. These search engines also want to see that the backlinks come from trusted websites. The backlinks, when used judiciously, also make the sites they link back to appear more trustworthy and authoritative. However, when the backlinks are used too often in one page or lead to spam pages, it hurts both sites involved.
This is the reason why many business websites use different SEO tools like backlink checker. This is to ensure that all backlinks are of high quality and doesn’t hurt their website. Read on below to learn more about backlinks.
What You Need to Know
What are Backlinks?
A backlink is simply a link that redirects anyone who visits your site to another website. This is extremely important for SEO because the more backlinks a site has led to it, the better chance that a person will find your site whenever they are looking for information or buying a product on the Internet.
There is a slight differentiation to make here regarding kinds of backlinks. External links are another kind of link websites can add to their pages, and you may be wondering what the difference is between the two. The secret is that external links and backlinks are the same thing—the difference in a name depends on which end of the redirection your site is on. If your website is linking to a different domain, the starting page, you would likely refer to that link as an external link because it is a link leading to a website external to your own. If your site is the one being linked to, the destination page, then you would think of that link as a backlink.
Backlinks You Should Avoid
There are a couple of types of backlinks that should be avoided when trying to increase your search engine ranking: spam and link farms. Each of these is a type of link that could harm your search engine ranking and, in some cases, your website itself.
Spamming links means to post links unrelated to your page’s content or to your website’s niche, oftentimes without any kind of context around it. It is an attempt to take advantage of the importance of external and backlinks in search engine rankings— however, Google and other search engines are wise to this attempt at manipulating their algorithms and will flag sites for using spam.
Link farms are formed up of a closed group of sites that spam hyperlinks from other sites in the group in order to boost each other’s search engine rankings. If you find a link farm, you should probably steer clear of it. This is because, in many cases, these companies don’t have a good reputation and are likely to be spamming others and making money at their expense. When you find a link farm, you can report it to Google as spam.
These days, there are several services that you can use to try and get other backlinks from other sources. This will help to avoid the potential of getting involved in one of these types of link farms and having your site listed as spam or just be outright banned.
How to Get High-Quality Backlinks?
Creating quality backlinking is crucial for getting a high ranking on all search engines. You see, there are a ton of search engines out there, and millions of websites, so there’s a lot of heavy competition out there. As such, it’s important to maximize your search engine optimization (SEO), and backlinks are an important part of that process. Now that you know some of the methods and strategies to avoid, it’s time to cover how you can effectively and ethically get backlinks.
A popular strategy for getting high-quality backlinks to your site is using the services of a professional company that specializes in SEO marketing. SEO agencies offer various strategies— including keyword research, article submission, guest posts, video submission, and social bookmarking— for websites and blogs to increase the chances that a person will find your site. You can even ask personalities like celebrities, influencers, and journalists for backlinks to increase the credibility of your site.
These services are invaluable to any business and can help drive traffic to your site. This type of traffic will also be much more targeted than traffic coming from some other techniques that a person can use for SEO. Since SEO is all about targeting specific keywords and phrases, a company can pinpoint keywords commonly used to bring quality traffic to sites, making your site stand out among the rest. And, by having traffic that is brought in by specific keywords relevant to your niche, you’ll have a higher potential of converting leads into new customers because these are people actually interested in your product or service.
3 Benefits of Using Backlinks
Understanding what backlinks are and how they help your site can be daunting and time-consuming. This is especially true for people who never heard of the term or have never worked with SEO in the past. But as an individual who wants to make the most out of their internet marketing efforts, it’s vital that you learn about backlinks. Having knowledge of how backlinks work is important as it allows you to reap the benefits of using them.
Listed below are just some of the benefits you can enjoy when you start incorporating backlinks to your internet marketing efforts:
Improves Your Organic Ranking on Google
There are a lot of benefits of using backlinks in your SEO campaign, but perhaps the most valuable one is the ability it provides to improve your website’s organic ranking on Google.
So, how exactly does a backlink boost your organic ranking? Google uses a special algorithm that is used to determine which websites are most relevant to a query. It’s these rankings that are used to gauge which websites should stay visible on a webpage and which should be removed, affecting your page’s ranking. Having backlinks to your site on a variety of other sites makes your site look like an authoritative source in your field, resulting in the search engine algorithms prioritizing your site when creating its rankings for the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Boost Online Traffic
Another major benefit of backlinks is that they provide you with targeted traffic. If your backlinks are present in other websites or online platforms, people who clicked on those links are more likely to be directed to your landing page, where they can find out more about what you offer. And, because they likely came from a site related to your site’s niche, the visitors that come to your site this way are more likely to be interested in the product or service that your site provides.
In other words, this will improve the number of visitors that you have to your website and, consequently, improve the amount of profit you earn overtime.
Faster Indexing
When a user types in a word or phrase into a search engine’s search box, search engines work by looking into all the web pages of every site connected to the words or phrases used in searching. It would be challenging for these bots to crawl into a website and recommend it to online users if there aren’t any backlinks that refer back to that website. Without other sites to functionally vouch for the quality and authority of yours, search engine algorithms are much less likely to prioritize your website.
Another benefit of backlinks is faster indexing by search engines. Search engine bots will be able to find your website faster and allow users to discover your platform faster when there are more backlinks out there for your website.
Final Thoughts
Once you understand how SEO link building and backlinks work, you will make better decisions regarding the backlinking you will be doing. This knowledge will help you choose more useful backlinking strategies, thus helping you achieve your online marketing goals.
You should also understand how search engines see backlinking. They take into consideration the quality of the backlink and whether or not it is relevant to the content and context that the link is surrounded by. When search engines can understand your backlinks, they will mark your site up higher or lower depending on its relevance. If the hosting site is not relevant, then your backlink will get a lower ranking. However, if your backlink is relevant to the page connected to it, your page will get a higher ranking.
Understanding how backlinks works will help you to become an expert in the field of SEO. By knowing the fundamentals, you will increase your online presence and enjoy increased sales.
