What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website. Backlinks are widely accepted as one of the most important ranking factors. In fact, Google has confirmed that backlinks are one of their top three search engine ranking factors. Generally speaking, pages with a lot of high-quality backlinks tend to have high search engine rankings.
There are two types of backlink, nofollow and dofollow. A nofollow link tells the search engine to ignore the link. A nofollow link does not pass any value from site to site so it won’t improve your organic search engine rankings. Building nofollow links can still benefit your business as they can still bring new visitors to your website. Dofollow links, on the other hand, do pass value and can improve your search engine rankings. You should be aiming to obtain mostly dofollow links in order to move up the search engine results page.
Why are Backlinks important?
First of all, backlinks can help search engines to find your website. If a search engine crawls a website and finds a link to your website, it will then crawl your site too. Backlinks can mean that your site is indexed more quickly. They can also bring more visitors to your website. If someone sees a link to your site on another website, they might click on that link and see what you have to offer.
Backlinks also build credibility. If a page with a good reputation links to you, search engines will think your website is a reliable source too. Sites with a lot of high-quality backlinks are seen as trustworthy and therefore, have better organic search engine rankings.
Not all backlinks will help your online presence. It is important to build links from websites which are relevant to your business. Search engines care not only about the quantity of links that a site has, but also about the quality. Obtaining backlinks from websites that have no relation to your business will have little positive effect on your search engine ranking. You also want to avoid backlinks from websites that search engines will see as spam as these could have a negative effect on your website’s ranking.
How do I get Backlinks?
So now you know why backlinks are so important, it’s time to start building them. In order to get backlinks, you need to create something that people will want to link to. This might sound daunting, but many businesses already have so-called ‘linkable assets’ on their websites. ‘How-to’ posts, infographics, and list articles often get more links than other posts, so this is a good place to start. A good way to get people to see these posts is to contact influencers in your niche and send them a link to your website. If they like what they see, they might share a link to your website to their followers.
You can also look for resource pages in your industry. A resource page is a page with links to several different pages containing useful information relating to a specific topic. If you have a page that could be useful to others, then you could contact the creator of the resource page and ask them to consider adding a link to your page. In order to find resource pages for your industry, try searching for ‘[your industry] useful resources’ or ‘[your industry] helpful links’.
Another way to get backlinks is to write a guest blog on someone else’s website. A lot of websites will give you a backlink or two if you write a blog post for them. As we mentioned before, it is important to look for links from websites which are relevant to yours, so if you’re looking to create content for another site, make sure that it’s still relevant to your business. To find guest blogging opportunities, try searching for your area of expertise paired with ‘write for us’ or ‘guest post’.
To conclude, backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors. Building backlinks can be a lengthy process but it is also a worthwhile one. Obtaining high-quality backlinks can improve your organic search engine rankings and bring more visitors to your website.
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