Backlink is a link that connects one website to another. They are one of the most important elements that search engines examine to judge the quality of a website.
Backlink is a link that connects one website to another. They are one of the most important elements that search engines examine to judge the quality of a website.
The number of backlinks leading to a website is essentially taken as a factor of authenticity by a search engine. When a website leaves a link to another, it basically shows that it (the site) vouches for the reliability of the other one.
Getting and providing backlinks to a website is an important factor to consider while running the SEO campaign of your website. These links can boost the organic reach of your site to a great extent by making it appear higher up in the search engines.
The following factors emphasize the importance of backlinks:
1- Higher Ranking:
The algorithms of search engines inspect the number of backlinks a site has in order to decide how high it will be ranked. A higher number of backlinks means a higher ranking of the site.
During the SEO optimization of the site, the experts keep in mind the factor of backlinks.
Backlinks can affect the ranking of your site in the following ways.
- They increase the popularity of your website. Consider a very popular website that has given the link to your website someplace within its content. When the readers of the first site will start going through their content, they will automatically see and pursue the links. If your website has also been linked to that same content, then it will mean you will get a steady stream of additional visitors.
- As high-ranked websites have more organic reach, it will also boost the reach of your own website i.e., if they happen to be linked.
- The topical authority of your site increases as other sites provide backlinks while talking about a similar topic to yours.
2- Higher Traffic Flow:
This is something that we have mentioned and fairly elaborated on above, but we’re still talking about it separately to highlight its significance.
The number of backlinks has a great influence on the factor of traffic flow on your website. The backlinks work as some sort of votes that other valuable domains are giving you.
A connection of your website with bigger websites increases your site’s visibility resulting in more visitors to it.
Increased visibility of your site increases the referral traffic on your site also. The increase in referral traffic will automatically increase the general traffic on your site.
3- Authenticity:
We talked about the authenticity factory above. But now, let’s take a deeper look at it.
People tend to like the content they believe is true and credible. Other sites vouching for your website increases its credibility factor.
Backlinking also increases the authenticity of your website. It works the same as the voting system. The more sites vote for your site the more authentic it gets.
Authenticity, then, builds the trust of your readers and generates a perception in their minds that the linked site has something worth checking to offer.
Readers, once convinced by the quality of the content of your site, keep revisiting it for more information in the future increasing the site’s traffic.
4- Site Recognition:
Brand recognition has always been an important factor for businesses.
More awareness of your brand online means more audience it will attract towards it. Moreover;
- When other websites link their information to your site, the recognition factor of your website grows.
- The benefit of backlinks can extend from the virtual presence of your brand viz. the website to the actual real-life entity itself. In other words, when the website gains recognition in the online world, it automatically seeps down and is transferred to the real-life domain as well. A brand can start off online, but due to its growing popularity, it can also become famous “offline” as well.
You put in all the effort in making your content top-notch. But if you don’t get yourself linked with a well-recognized website, your brand will remain hidden on the internet.
5- Provides Long-Term Promotion:
Here’s why:
- Once you successfully obtain a backlink from a quality site, it will keep providing traffic to your website for a very long time.
- The value of your site will remain high as long as the domains that have provided you backlinks will stay valuable (and there is a strong possibility that they will remain valuable for a very long time.)
How to Build Backlinks:
Now that we have discussed the importance of backlinks for the growth of your website, let’s talk about how to generate backlinks that can do the required job.
Guest Blogging/Outreach
Here are the steps that you can follow for guest blogging/outreach:
1. Browse the websites that are offering the guest posting option for other sites. Make sure to filter out the niche that matches your site. You have to filter out the high-quality websites by checking metrics such as traffic, DA and DR. Here is an example of these metrics of a sample website:
2. Acquire the contact information of the site and reach out to them to inform them that you are willing to collaborate with them.
3. Once you get the response from their website, provide them with your content.
4. In your content, add the links you want and optimize them using SEO’s best practices.
Creating Link-Worthy Content and Publishing it on Your Site
Another way to get backlinks to your websites is by putting in efforts to make your content valuable and authoritative.
Here are some things that you can include in your content to make it link-worthy:
- Do thorough research about the topic you are talking about on your site. The research will help you deliver your information more effectively, which other websites can use to demonstrate their stances to their audience.
- Use proper images and graphs to demonstrate your expertise and command over the subject matter.
- Use statistics and figures linked to authoritative websites to add authenticity and value to the content. You could, for example, talk about how there are 600 million blogs in the world as of 2023. As you can see in the last sentence, just because our statement of ours is blue and underlined (which shows that it is linked), it is more believable and reliable.
- Keep your content readable. Wherever possible, don’t use difficult words and terms. For one, instead of writing “perfidy”, you should go for “unreliability”. People like reading content that they can understand, and not some text that looks like a page out of a thesaurus. If there are any statements or sentences that you can’t figure out how to simplify, you can take the help of an online paraphrasing tool. We used rephrase.info to share how such a tool can paraphrase your complex written sentences and make them more readable.
- You can also consider giving backlinks to other sites in the preferable content of your site. This factor increases the authenticity of your site and other websites will tend to give your site backlinks.
- You should follow SEO best practices to make your content worth linking. These practices can include avoiding keyword stuffing, adding internal links, improving the visuals of your site, optimizing its loading time, adding heading tags, etc.
Conclusion
Backlinks are one of the fundamental elements that can improve the ranking of your websites in the SERPs. They add to the integrity and reliability of your website, which makes it more likely to draw a higher number of visitors to it.
This can, in turn, increase the revenue of a website, which is more or less the main goal of every other webmaster.
But, this type of idealistic outcome isn’t that easy. Building backlinks can be quite a task, and there are a lot of different factors/steps that you have to be mindful of.
At the end of this article, we looked at some vital steps that you can follow to build promising backlinks.
