SEO (Search Engine Optimization) approaches are intended to raise a website’s rankings and boost visitors through organic search. They’re designed to help your web page scale and appear on the first page of Google and other search engines. And let’s be honest, that’s a website owner’s biggest dream!
Link building is a common term when it comes to SEO strategies because it’s one of the most important parts of them. Have you ever wondered why a web page might have relevant content, a good interface, and a quick charging speed, but it still can’t rank higher on the search engine results page? Lack of backlinks can be the principal reason for that. Today, we’ll show you all the backlink benefits for SEO and give you the most effective strategies for them.
A Brief Introduction to Backlinks
Backlinks (also referred to as incoming links or inbound links) are external links that lead to another specific web page or site. They’re often behind anchor texts. Both the quantity and quality of backlinks are used by search engines like Google as ranking factors. Consequently, getting backlinks is a key SEO tactic.
How Do Backlinks Work?
Since another website would link to yours only if it thought your material was of high quality, search engines take backlinks as votes or indications. The more quality backlinks you get from other sites, the more domain authority you earn.
Domain Authority
The root domains, or the total number of links to the site, are evaluated to determine the domain authority (DA), which is expressed on a scale of 1 to 100. You can visualize a website’s DA through MozBar or other SEO metrics applications that are available online.
A site is typically thought to have good Domain Authority if it has many high-quality external links. But because those SEO tools work by determining which sites could obtain better positioning in searches, it cannot be assured that a rating is good or bad in itself.
Types of Backlinks
Not all backlinks will be beneficial for you. Try to reach for the highest quality backlinks you can. Did you know a single high-quality backlink can outperform hundreds, even thousands of low-quality backlinks? Let’s catch a glimpse at a high-quality link’s anatomy and the key characteristics they share to be labeled so
They Come from Trusted, High-Authority Websites
- Simply put, authoritative websites are reliable information sources. A backlink from a site with 70+ DR like will be more valuable than one from a site with 20 DR. Needless to say, analyze your backlinks carefully and avoid at all costs the ones from spammy or shady websites.
They Are Natural Links
- Links that occur organically are better qualified by Google and other search engines than unnatural ones, which are usually sponsored or paid for through affiliate programs, monetization scripts, etc.
- Google algorithms are currently updating and evolving to analyze backlinks’ origins. Avoid paid backlinks because search engines are unable to determine who paid for them, and how reliable the content is.
They Are in a Natural Anchor Text
- Anchor texts are the visible part of a link, the text on which we click. The anchor text for the page receiving the link should be brief, and pertinent, and make it crystal obvious what the page’s subject is before the visitor is sent there.
- Keep generics to a minimum! Keep in mind that for a link to appear genuine, a natural anchor text is the way to go.
They Are “DoFollow” Types of Backlinks
- There are dofollow links and nofollow links. Dofollow links provide authority to a website, whereas nofollow ones inform the search engine that it is not required to “follow” or provide authority to that link. These types of sources typically have nofollow links:
- Blog post comments
- Pay-per-click ads
- Press releases
- You might not want nofollow backlinks, but they’re not that bad. They can still help you boost traffic, create brand awareness, and make your backlink algorithms look more natural.
They’re From a New, Different Domain Every Time
- The more domains you get backlinks from, the merrier. It is better to obtain backlinks from 10 different web pages than ten backlinks from the same webpage. Let’s say that by this, Google and other search engines understand that your site links are trusted and respected by a considerable amount of other sites.
They’re From a Site in the Same or Similar Niche
- Getting backlinks from other websites with material that is completely unrelated to your own will lower your rank and drive less relevant visitors to your website. The secret is to link to authoritative websites that relate to your website’s theme and content.
Top Benefits of Backlinks
- More backlinks, more website traffic
- Help you increase referral traffic
- Help you become an authority site yourself
- Build new relationships
- Increase your popularity and recognition
Strategies to Start Getting Backlinks
Guest Blogging
When someone publishes an article on a website they do not own as a guest author, this is known as guest blogging. It is one of the principal practices for link building. They are typically subject-matter specialists who write blog posts on the topics they are most knowledgeable about. In this regard, guest blogging has advantages for the guest blogger and the platform on which they write their content.
Accepting Guest Posts
One of the foundations for link-building is cultivating relationships within your online community. I know, this one may sound like it would only benefit the other website and not yours. But let me explain to you that this is a passive way of link-building. It may not be as fast as others, but it will assist you in developing connections with people who are more likely to promote your blog and link to your postings at a given time.
Broken Link Fixing
When you skim through a web page and find a link you are interested in, and when you click it, it leads to an error page, there is a full opportunity for a new backlink in front of you. So if you are interested in creating links, you might want to search for dead links from pages related to or on your same niche and ask the site owner to replace them with your updated and relevant content links.
There are tools designed to find those dead or broken links, like Moz’s Link Explorer. Always have present that not all broken links are worth chasing. If the same website has a considerable amount of broken links, it probably means that it is an outdated page, and web traffic from those is from low to non-existent.
Blogger Reviews
The help of other bloggers and content creators for your SEO backlinks is extremely advantageous. If you sell a product or service you know a specific influencer would enjoy, don’t be shy and offer them to try it for free! It’s a digital marketing strategy that rarely fails.
You have to be careful about how you approach the blogger or influencer, though. Google Webmaster Guidelines state that you shall not ask someone to exchange links or reviews for your goods. Don’t focus on receiving something back. Instead, kindly offer your product or service. If it satisfies them, you will likely get a backlink back to your site naturally.
The Skyscraper Technique
This old but gold technique has helped many websites rank higher on Google. And it is about finding the highest quality content from authoritative sites with potential link juice and making something better based on its weaknesses or lacks, to finally promoting it to the right audience.
FAQs
Why Are Backlinks Helpful?
The benefits of backlinks are endless, as they directly impact your website traffic. As previously mentioned, search engine results are based mostly on how many quality backlinks lead to one site. So having a neat backlink strategy and getting relevant sites to link to your web pages will make you climb your way to the first search engine results pages and earn a higher domain authority as well as other benefits such as getting other websites to send referral traffic to you and building network relationships.
What Makes a Backlink Powerful?
- Coming from high authority sites.
- The number of sites that point back to it
- The naturality in which it happens
- The correlation between the backlink and the page leading to it
- It has quality content
- The number of dofollows (remember nofollows can be helpful too)
Are There Disadvantages of Backlinking in Marketing?
It depends on the approach you give them. When you do not define a clear, well-analyzed backlink plan, you can earn backlinks that have no real value for you, and that could even affect your search rankings.
Paying for backlinks, and getting backlinks from sketchy websites or sites that do not relate to yours, can even result in penalizations from Google.
Can You Rank Without Backlinks?
It’s highly unlikely to be found in the first search results with zero backlinks. An authority site ranking in the top 3 Google results usually has hundreds of backlinks behind it. However, you can earn a spot without a massive amount of high-quality backlinks by looking for low-competition target keywords and creating quality content about them that matches search queries.
The Wrap-Up
Backlinks, internal links, inbound links, or however you prefer calling them, are not exactly easy to earn. Building links takes time and effort, but in terms of digital marketing, appearing on the first page of Google or any other search engine is a dream come true. Not only do you earn more website visitors and organic traffic, but you earn status and recognition in an evolving and competitive world.
