You will become familiar with the word ‘backlink’ once you own a website and care about the successful Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of it. As a new blogger, you may not be very clear about what backlinks are, why are backlinks important or how to create backlinks for your website.
Yourwebsite is here to the rescue. Not only do we offer the best webhosting options and domain name registration but also, we post frequent blogs on how to improve your website and market it. This article will help you to understand the types of backlinks, why they are essential to your SEO, the best backlinks and how they help in your online success.
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What are Backlinks?
Like many new bloggers you may be wondering, ‘what are backlinks?’ Backlinks are commonly known as “inbound links”, “incoming links” or “external links”. They are essentially external links from one website to another. They reflect the transition from one site to another like.
In addition,they also help to correctly index your website pages. That’s why search engines such as Google use backlinks to help determine your page ranking. (see what we did there? That was a perfect example of a backlink) Websites that have a large number of backlinks usually have higher organic search engine rankings.
Why are Backlinks Important?
One of the main reasons backlinks are important and especially valuable for SEO is because they essentially represent a website’s vote of confidence in another site.
Therefore, backlinks to your website is a sign to search engines that others vouch for your content. Whenever there are several backlinks to the same webpage or website, search engines deduce that the content must be worth linking.
The result of this continuous resurfacing will prompt search engines to add that particular link to their Search Engine Results Pages, SERP. So, there’s a positive effect on your site’s ranking position each time there is a backlink to your site.
6 Types of Backlinks and How to Create Them
It’s clear that backlinks are beneficial to your website. With so many websites around, how do you tap into or create the best backlinks to your website?
Before we share with you a few types of backlinks and some simple ways to create them, do bear in mind that the traffic you drive to your website with backlinks is not about quantity. The quality of the backlinks is what makes the difference. The more authoritative the websites that link to you, the better the rankings and traffic your site will get.
Also, bear in mind that you can face penalisation by Google Penguin’s algorithm if you use using some paid services to get backlinks to your site. That right there is a great example of a backlink.
So how can you create quality backlinks for your website in 2020? Here are some ways you can do that.
1. Write and publish informative and engaging articles
If you want people to link to your website, you need to give them a reason. One of the easiest and best ways is by writing and publishing an awesome article.
If your content is informative, helpful and easy to read, persons will be happy to link to it.
How do you create an awesome article?
Here are some tips to get you started:
- Solve the problem. Most persons search and read content because they’re looking for a solution. Simply zoom in on a specific problem and articulate how to fix it.
- Make your content easy to read. Write in short, simple sentences. Make sure your article is also visually appealing. Do so by adding formatting, headings, images and other multimedia.
- Have a unique angle. There’s so much content on the Internet today. How will your article stand out?
- Build authority into the article. People trust others with authority on particular topics. If you’re not an expert, interview one and quote him/her.
After publishing your captivating and helpful post, be sure to send some outreach emails. Ensure that you target websites and bloggers who have published similar articles on the same topic. These persons will more likely be interested in reading and linking your post.
2. Do Guest Blogging
Collaboration is a great way to improve the chances of getting links for article(s) on your website. Guest blogging is a great collaboration strategy where you write a post for another person’s blog(s), instead of your own.
How does this help you in terms of link building?
Simply put, in exchange for a free article, blog owners usually allow you to create 1-2 links back to your website within the post.
But, who wants guest bloggers and how do you find them? You can look for sites that are accepting guest posts. On these sites, you’ll notice a page calling for contributors, such as “Write For Us” or “Contribute” page. You can use Google’s advanced search operators to help you locate these sites.
Some search operators you can use:
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[your_topic] “write for us”
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[your_topic] “become an author”
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[your_topic] “guest post”
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[your_topic] “guest article”
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[your_topic] inurl:contribute
From there, all you have to do is follow the instructions and submit a pitch.
3. Replicate Your Competitors Backlinks
You may be a new blogger with a new website but your competitors may not be. This means two wonderful things:
- It’s likely they’ve already gotten several backlinks
- They’ve possibly done some link building of their own (for better ranking)
Don’t see this as a threat but an advantage. Figuring out your competitors’ backlinks is a great strategy. Once you find out their process simply replicate them.
To help you do this, you can use a tool in Ahrefs called Link Intersect. This too will show you who is linking to multiple competitors’ backlinks, but not to you.
4. Rebuild Broken Links
The internet is always consistently evolving. As a result, pages are moved, changed and deleted all the time. Broken links refer to links to pages that no longer exist.
Broken links contribute to poor user experience. Therefore, nobody likes them. However, they still exist because it takes a lot of effort for persons to continuously take broken links off their sites.
Take advantage of that.
- Locate a broken link
- Recreate the dead content
- Reach out to the persons linking to it and ask them to link to your recreated version.
Seems easy and it is. However, you need to find the right “broken” content to recreate and pitch. Use a tool that helps you to analyse backlinks so you can choose the best one.
5. Build Internal links
A key factor in creating a successful blog is that of creating internal links. By creating a good internal linking structure, you can help users to easily navigate their way on your website. This will also increase the overall user experience.
There are several tools that can help you to automatically create internal links on your blog, especially if you are running a site on WordPress. It’s recommended that you keep your internal links per page below 100, for both SEO and usability.
6. Promote Your Content
It doesn’t matter how great your content is, you won’t get any backlinks unless you promote it properly. To get it out to the world you can use email marketing as well as cross-promotion using your social media platforms.
Summary
Backlinks make your website more credible and authoritative to search engines. This results in your web pages getting higher in the SERPs.
When it comes on to backlinks that help your SEO, always remember that quality backlinks are more important than quantity. A few good, authoritative backlinks will do more for your site than numerous weak ones. Also, ensure you monitor backlinks to posts on your website, so you can see which are performing well and the ones which aren’t.
So, should you be asked, “What are backlinks?” or “why are backlinks important?” A simple response is that backlinks are an important aspect of a sites SEO ranking and online success. Create, rebuild and monitor your backlinks regularly.
