Everything You Should Know About BACKLINKS
Are you new to blogging?
If you are, you may have come across the word “Backlinks” many times as it is used often in the process of search engine optimization (SEO). Those who are new entrants in the field of blogging often struggle to understand the term website backlinks.
Well, they all form an important part of the SEO activity and contribute to the online success of a website. If your website tends to get a large number of backlinks, it’s proof that people are visiting your website. Now, let’s understand what backlinks are all about, let’s start with the basics.
Inbound Links, Incoming Links, or Backlinks, What To Say?
They all do the same work. Backlinks are about gaining confidence and connecting the dots, that too the important ones.
Backlinks are like a quality pair of hiking boots!
When we think of backlinks from a broader perspective, they are one of the major contributing factors to rank a webpage. Internet is a collection of domains and web pages that contain links from internal as well as external sources, which establishes connectivity from one page to another eventually helping to enhance online visibility.
Suppose you are to climb Mount Everest, you would probably need good-quality hiking shoes. Similarly, if you wish to rank higher in SERPs, some solid backlinks are a must, to rank the webpages.
Also Read: 5 Game-Changing SEO Backlink Strategies for eCommerce Success
Who Links To My Website & Why Is It Important To Know?
When you are to climb the virtual mountain of success, it is important to know who contributed to it. Technically speaking, it is important to know who links to your website, which means you need to focus on your backlinks while you are working on your SEO strategy.
But still, there is an obvious question that might be lingering on your mind: why it is important to know who links to the website? Well, here are some reasons that you should keep an eye on who vouch for your content:
We have got such an awesome link building strategy!
It helps to keep track of your link building strategy as it’s a great parameter to ascertain your website’s success. If you have got tons of good backlinks, your link building strategy is doing a great job and you should focus on replicating the same.
Your content is the pathway to success!
If you succeed to get a handful of backlinks organically without investing money, you are creating great content. This way, you can analyze the success of your content and strategy.
Realize the power of word-of-mouth!
If you notice some backlinks coming from the websites that are praising your blog, brand, product or service then, you are on the right track. Carry on with your brand promotion strategy by creating awesome content.
Analyzing Your Backlink Profile
Once you have located your backlink profile it is important that you go through your website. It would help you to understand the dynamics of your website whether all is going well with it or is there any bug that could cause an issue.
Have a look at some important points that you need to pay attention to:
Stay away from the bad boys of the internet!
Analyzing your backlink profile would help to spot and sieve any fishy entries in your website. It is important to keep track of backlinks from websites that have a high spam score as it may harm the credibility of the websites.
Don’t accompany those who are stuck at the unexplored depth of page 100
If you are getting backlinks from the websites with a good domain authority score, you are doing well; if not, you will see your competitor backlinks taking over the internet. It is important you filter such websites with low domain authority and add them to your warning list.
Collect juicy backlinks to rank well
Page authority is another parameter to judge whether your page will rank in the SERPs or not. It is similar to domain authority but, predicts the potential of a specific page to rank where it uses a logarithmic scale of 0 to 100. You should aim to fill the backlinks that will have a positive effect on your ranking.
Glossary Of Common Terms
1. Link Juice:
Link juice simply helps in value addition where it passes on the worth from one page or one website to another. Link helps in increasing the ranking of the page or the website as it passes a link juice when connected from one site to another.
Well, if you use a no follow tag, you can opt out of passing the link juice to other websites.
2. No Follow Link:
When a website connected to another, doesn’t pass the link juice, it means that the website follows a ‘no follow’ tag. It is usually used when the link is directed from an unreliable source and doesn’t contribute to the ranking of the page.
3. Do Follow Link:
Any link that passes the link juice is termed as do follow link. Well, mostly the links that are added to a blog post are ‘do follow’ links.
4. Low-Quality Links:
A low-quality link is another factor that should be considered while including backlinks to your website. These links come from harvested sites or spam sites which would surely harm the traffic of your website, thus you should be careful while buying backlinks.
5. Internal Links:
Internal links are those which are directed from one page to the other within the same domain. The process of linking one page to the other is called interlinking.
How To Earn Backlinks?
Now that you know what backlinks are all about, you might want to know the source to acquire backlinks.
Quality Vs. Quantity
The major point of consideration while focussing on the backlinks is, you don’t need to worry about the number of backlinks that you get but the quality, as it is what matters at the end.
So, get some quality backlinks for your blog:
Content is the king!
If you want people to follow and link to you, you have to give them a reason to do so. Your content reflects your ideology and gives people an enjoyable journey to embark on with the help of magical words—’keywords’.
Once you are done with your blog, it’s time to find the audience who would be interested in reading your blog posts and reach out to you through media.
Everything beneficial comes from being known
Do you know what is being talked about?
Guest blogging is one that you can surely use to reach out to a variety of people where you can write for other people’s blogs instead of writing for your own.
However, finding relevant websites to link your blogs is a challenge. The simple way is to look for websites that already accept guest posts. You will find contributing pages on websites like “write for us” or “contribute”.
Apart from this, you can also look for blogging opportunities with the help of certain tools such as Ahref’s Content Explorer.
Sometimes it’s good to copy your competitor
You may have a new website to launch but, remember that you have to deal with the same number of competitors in the market. You can use it to your advantage by finding out the source or way they have acquired a new link. And, you can find your audience and reach out to them.
The bridge is always there. It’s you who have to discover it
What is a broken link?
As websites constantly evolve with time and new content, they undergo a process where web pages move or get deleted and as a result links to those pages cease to exist. Such links are called broken links.
Moreover, it contributes to poor user experience as the reader’s rhythm is broken in case there is a broken link in the content.
Do you know the concept of broken link building?
If not, then we are here with some scalable broken link building tactics that would surely help you increase your visibility online. Well, the approach is quite simple:
1. Find a different number of broken links on the webpage.
2. You have to recreate the dead content.
3. Reach out to different people with their recreated content to link to other webpages.
Moreover, finding the right broken links is equally important when you tend to reach out to a different set of audiences. To help you overcome this challenge, there are certain tools that can be used to get a report on broken links. Let’s have a look at that:
- Sitechecker: It’s an online tool that comes with a free version and is a great tool to audit the whole website along with backlink tracker, keyword rank tracker, and SEO monitoring.
- Screaming Frog: It’s a desktop application that comes with a free version that allows 500 broken links. It has the option of custom search and custom extraction that works with the support of Robot.txt to check performance.
- Google Webmaster: It’s an online tool that facilitates SEO optimization for most of the websites. A Free version is also available for this tool. You need to contact Google for pricing if you wish to get a paid version.
- Ahrefs Broken Link Checker: It’s a paid online tool and the free version is not available for this specific tool. It helps to spot the competitor’s backlinks and shows the ‘Do follow’ and ‘No follow’ links.
Now that you know the tools, you have to spot the Do follow links which has a great scope and opportunity for backlinks to enhance the online visibility of your website. After you have gauged the scope of backlinks, you need to recreate the content and reach out to people with the maximum number of Do-follow links.
Also Read: The Importance of Internal and External Links in SEO
Influence people through your presence
Apart from focusing on backlinks to improve your online presence, web directories are another way to improve your visibility as you get an increased margin of backlinks. However, finding an authentic and legal web directory is slightly difficult.
Well, there are certain points of consideration when it comes to directory submission of your blogs. You will come across certain web directories that may ask you to create a backlink directed to their own website, it is advised to avoid such web directories.
Moreover, if you are using tactics such as automatic directory submission, you should avoid using those as it may result in getting your blog to appear as a spam. This will surely lower down your domain authority or deletion of your blog from search engines.
Final Words
If you are new to blogging and working on increasing your online visibility, you should start with getting a maximum number of backlinks directed towards your blog. It contributes greatly to your online success. This was all about how backlinks work and help in understanding why you should start working on getting backlinks.
