Backlinks boost your rankings on the internet but earning them can be quite a task. But the right resources and strategies can help you find opportunities to build and earn backlinks for your website. First, let’s look at what backlinks are, how to generate backlinks and why ‘the good ones’ are important. Let’s get started.
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What are backlinks anyway?
If you’ve heard of “inbound links” or “incoming links,” you’ve heard of backlinks, because they are all the same thing. They are links that one website receives from another. If website A links to your website, you get a backlink from them and if you return the favor, they get a backlink from you.
Why are backlinks important?
Backlinks are important to your website for three main reasons.
- Discoverability
- Referral Traffic
- Rankings
1. Discoverability
Search engines are always looking for new content. They do this by going back to websites they already know and trust, to check for new links. If one of these sites links your site, it becomes much easier for search engines to discover your content.
2. Referral traffic
Backlinks are like little maps, directing people to the resources they need, which is why they are clickable. So, when someone clicks on a link to your website, you receive referral traffic.
In a nutshell, backlinks from high-traffic pages sends referral traffic to your website.
3. Rankings
Backlinks help determine how search engines view your website and as a result, improve your website’s SEO ranking. In fact, backlinks are like votes of confidence. The more backlinks (votes) your site gets, the better it’s ranked.
How to generate backlinks to your website?
It’s common knowledge that backlinks impact websites one way or another. When you generate backlinks it can dictate if your website sinks or swims, it’s therefore important that you know how to generate them to your website.
Here are the three of the best ways to generate backlinks and grow your online presence. You can:
- Create them
- Earn them
- Build them
But before we get into the details of how to generate backlinks, the rule of thumb is to start with developing quality, shareable content.
Produce content that people want to share and this will open up your website to receiving more backlinks, whether it’s created, earned or built. With that out of the way, let’s discuss the different ways of generating backlinks to your website.
1. Create them
Creating backlinks calls for some manual labor. You will have to manually add the links from other websites to yours.
Examples of this include leaving blog comments, replying to threads on different forums and submitting your links to business directories.
2. Earn them
Earned backlinks are organic. These are the links of your webpage that people add to their site. So, you get earned backlinks when someone finds your content through social media, search engines like Google or by word of mouth and links to your page.
Remember, the more quality backlinks you get, the better your website ranking. So, to improve your chances of earning more backlinks, go back to the rule of thumb mentioned earlier – create quality, shareable content.
3. Building backlinks
You build backlinks by reaching out to others, whether it’s fellow website owners or others within your niche. The aim is to ask them to link to your page, but you have to be strategic. Let them know what they stand to get from the proposition.
Here are a few ways you can build backlinks:
Guest blogging:
It can be really scary to reach out to websites with a large following, but you never know unless you try. So reach out and offer to write a guest post for another website. Most websites and blogs will allow space for backlinks in a short bio that they generally put at the beginning or end of each post. Writing guest posts has triple benefits. It allows you to demonstrate your knowledge, build relationships with other players in your industry and generate high quality backlinks.
Broken link building:
If you have ever clicked on a link, on a site or post, that takes you nowhere, you are familiar with what a broken/dead link is. You may have some of these on other sites, but the good news is that they can be fixed. You will need to do some sort of ‘website monitoring’ to find these dead links.
Start with using a broken link checker to find these links and then reach out to the site owner/operator to see if they can be replaced with your working link. This may seem like a lot of work, but it’ll be worth it.
Unlinked mentions:
This is similar to broken links, yet somewhat different. In this case, an author may have mentioned your website, but didn’t provide a link. Here, you can, again, reach out to the author and ask them to make the mention clickable.
Network:
One of the keys to business success is networking. There are a host of benefits to gain from networking. It gives you the opportunity to share your content and pitch guest blog posts. Networking also allows you and those you have a close professional relationship with, to decide to backlink each other’s sites.
It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, you need to network and sites like LinkedIn and Facebook for business makes it easy to do so. However, while these platforms make it easier to network, ensure the backlinks align with your niche, unless your aim is to branch out into another area. This can help to keep your ‘record’ clean while boosting your SEO rankings.
Collaborate on special projects:
Collaborating on creative projects is a great way to build backlinks to your website. It also allows you to widen your audience. Maybe you have an ecommerce store that specializes in homemade beauty products or you are into cooking, but whatever your niche is, there are countless projects you can collaborate on.
These projects will allow those involved to share their knowledge while providing backlinks to their website.
Summary
Ranking in search engine cannot be separated from backlinks and vice versa. It is therefore important that businesses know how to generate backlinks to their websites.
However, it must be noted that not all backlinks are created equal and all while quantity counts, quality backlinks will always value much more.
