A backlink is a page from your website to a page on another website. It’s sometimes called inbound link, incoming link, and one way link (we will be using these terms interchangeably).
Backlinks are an important search engine ranking factor. They serve as a vote of confidence from one website to another.
In a nutshell, every backlink from another website to your site is a signal to search engines that other websites trust your content. In the world of SEO, websites with a high number of backlinks tend to rank higher on SERP.
Whether your website is new or has been running for a while, earning more backlinks could positively affect your website’s ranking position, and search visibility.
Types of Backlinks
Basically, there are two types of backlinks - Nofollow and Dofollow. Nofollow links don’t add any value to your website. They are links with a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag applied to them.
Nofollow tags tell Search Engine to ignore the link. Since they don’t add any value to your website, they won’t impact it ranking potentials. So, while implementing your backlinking strategy, ensure you put more effort in getting Dofollow links.
Talking of Dofollow links, here are some of the best link building companies to help you get valuable Dofollow links for your website.
Every high quality site the links to your website increases its authority. So, the more high quality sites link to your website, the more Google likes it, and possibly increases your website ranking.
Factors for Backlinks
There are two factors for backlinks - topical factor, and trustworthy factor. Topical factor has to do with the links you get from websites in the same niche with you. And trustworthy factors refer to backlinks from trusted authority websites with great credibility.
Who Needs Backlinks?
If you have a new website trying to rank high on Search Engine Result Page (SERP), your business website hasn’t been attracting the right industrial audience to your website, you need to focus more on your off-page SEO. And backlinks are game-changing off-page SEO factors that could increase your website authority in no time.
Similarly, you could also use backlinks to improve the ranking of a landing page when trying to attract leads or build an email list.
Let me quickly clarify something before we continue. Your website could still rank high on Google if you aren’t able to build backlinks. After all, backlink is just a part of the off-line SEO equation.
If you focus on consistently creating mind-blowing contents that go viral, you could build backlinks organically and improve your website ranking potential.
The Backlinking Strategy that Works
There are different strategic ways to get high quality backlinks to your website without spamming other people’s sites. If you don’t have the expertise to source backlinks yourself, you could hire some of the best links management agencies to lay a solid foundation and do the hard work it takes to build both content strategy, keyword planning and backlink acquisition.
But if you know a few things about link building, you can do it yourself. It is going to take some time, so you might want to start with one or two backlinking strategies and build from there once you get some traction.
As a rule, always focus on the quality of backlinks you get to your website, not the quantity. Don’t forget that Google frowns at sites that try to manipulate search engines through backlinks. This practice to the SEO world is known as “gray-hat SEO.”
However, if you approach your backlinks building strategy correctly(without violating any Google’s terms and conditions), your website will be free from Google penalties and algorithm updates. This practice is known as “white-hat”.
If Google suspects spamming, or bypassing the algorithm, they will penalize your site, which can result in a substantial loss in SEO momentum.
Reporting Broken Links
One of the easiest ways to get backlinks as a newbie is to check posts and articles with resources within your niche. Check for broken links within the posts. You can use browser extensions like; Check My Links for Chrome to search out broken links and report them accordingly.
Instead of checking for broken links manually, you can use some specific websites and software to help with the process.
If you find broken links, contact the webmaster and politely inform them that you noticed some of the resources listed on the page are no longer working, and give them suggestions for replacements, and include your page as one of them.
Now, there isn’t a guarantee that this would work, as the webmaster may no longer be updating their page, or may not want to link to your site.
However, if they monetize their website, they will be thankful that you kindly let them know. This way, they can improve their page for their readers as well.
Article Writing
Content is king and if you can create irresistible, informative, and engaging contents consistently, you could become a niche authority in no time.
Let me be reality with you, it may take some time to build backlinks using content writing strategy. But it works in the long run.
Start by submitting thought-provocative articles and blogs on article directories like Hubpages, Medium, and several other sites that could help increase your domain and page authority.
These sites are considered very trustworthy, and they receive high quality niche oriented traffic.
When submitting articles to a directory, make sure that your contents are original and will provide value to their audience. Again, don’t forget to add a link to your website in the bio section.
With several tools and resources online, it’s easier to get content ideas these days. You can use Google search and trend functions to check trending topics in your niche. Alternatively, you can browse YouTube and social media platforms to check for topic ideas.
Again, you could get inspiration from someone else’s content. But don’t plagiarise, it could ruin your website SEO. Similar to articles are infographic posts. You can create an infographic and submit it to directories that specifically focus on your niche area.
Guest Posts and Interviews
You can reach out to webmasters or business owners and see if you can team up and create a guest post for them, and they will create one for you in return.
You can also reach out to influencers and see if they will be willing to link to your post. There is a good chance that this could cost you a fortune (especially if you are engaging industry leaders), but it would be money well spent.
You don’t need to limit these ideas to writing, If you know of a podcast that you think is an excellent fit for your site, you can reach out to them and see if you can be on their podcast.
Reversely, you can reach out to influencers and others in your niche and ask to interview them for an article, podcast, or video. Once you complete your content piece, reach out to them again with the link and any promotional media to share with their followers.
Social Media and Internal Linking
Nobody is better at being an advocate for you than you are for yourself. If you have social media, which you should have if you plan on making money online, make sure to link to your page in your bio section of each account.
If you have other websites or accounts, you may be able to find a way to link back to the leading site. If your main site has more than one page to it, you can connect it to other pages to direct back to the main one. Different pages on the same domain still count as separate sites, they have an overall different URL.
Research Your Competitors
Find out what your competitors are doing and the websites they are generating links to them. There are some good tools you can use to achieve this.
Subscribe to their newsletters or follow them on social media to see what content they are putting out, and what kind of engagement they have. Or, set up a Google Alert for every time they get mentioned, and you will be able to see who is talking about and linking to them.
Wrap Up
Hopefully, you can see the importance of backlinking and find an option that works for you. If you implement what you learn from this article correctly, you will be able to build high quality links to your website. And this could increase your web pages ranking potential on Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
