If you have done a bit study on Search Engine Optimisation, you must have come across the term “backlinks”. Backlink has become one of the important factors in SEO along with authoritative content. If you have a website and you want it to rank in the search engine results, you should really consider how to generate backlinks to your website.
What is a backlink, why it is important, and how it can help your site’s SEO?
Backlinks are the hyperlinks directed towards your website from other web resources. These are known as inbound links as well. When other websites, web pages, and web directories hyperlink to your website, that is considered as a backlink.
It creates a huge impact on the presence of a website in search engine results. Search engines calculate page rankings using multiple factors to display search results and backlink is one of those. When a search engine runs its algorithm to decide the relevance of a website to a keyword, it considers the number of quality inbound links to the website. Furthermore, the search engine evaluates the content of the website to determine the quality of an inbound link. When links to your website come from other websites and those websites have related content to your website, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your website. The higher the relevance of inbound links from more authoritative websites, the greater their quality.
Backlinks help to get more organic traffic to your website. More organic traffic means more popularity and more new visitors!
The thumb rule to generate backlinks to your website
Backlinks should be natural, this means that a website must not use artificial ways to create backlinks for their own websites. The quality of links is far more important than the quantity. You should generate backlinks to your website slowly over time. Backlinks can be created from your own web pages as well as long as the content is relevant. Linking to your own page is called internal linking.
Generate backlinks to your website in five easy ways
Below are some quick and easy way to generate a good number of backlinks through authoritative websites.
1. Build internal links
Link to your internal web pages that are relevant to your content. You will always find some phrases or keywords in your content that you need to describe a bit and you might have already written a separate article on that topic earlier. So you should obviously link to that article from your content which will create a passing juice link.
2. Promote your content
Your content may be great, however, it won’t get backlinks until you promote it the right way. Start contacting webmasters and bloggers who are running weekly roundups. Give them a brief introduction of your content in the email along with a link and if they found your content useful they most likely will add the backlink to that page. These bloggers constantly look for great content for roundups. So they would definitely like to hear from you back.
3. Write comments, reviews, and testimonials
An easy way to generate backlinks to your website is to write regular reviews and testimonials and comment on the websites that you often use. There is a good chance of getting a link back to your website. You may have noticed when filling up the review or comment form, they generally ask for the name, email, website, and the comment or review/rating in the form. When you comment, review or testimonial is finally approved and published on their website, it will have the link to your website as a backlink.
4. Use social media channels
In general, all social media channels add the “nofollow” and “external” rel attribute to the anchor tags to prevent the backlink spamming. However, you need to find out the proper channel which will still serve your purpose. You can still use the LinkedIn page, Google places, Digg, Reddit, FourSquare, StumbleUpon, Yelp, YouTube, Hubpages, etc. to publish and promote your content regularly and get a good number of social media-driven traffic to your website.
5. Guest post on related websites
Do regular guest posts on the related and relevant websites. Keep in mind, when you are searching for sites that are accepting guest content, your main focus should be to find relevant sites to your niche and industry. Guest blogging has numerous benefits. For instance, you can build backlinks with guest posts, promote your website, and get traffic from there. The backlinks you get through guest blogging can improve your rankings in search engines.
Conclusion
Most importantly, you should try to generate backlinks to your website over time, at a slow pace. In short, you should never just post your website’s link on every possible website! Posting your website’s link everywhere won’t help you rank well. Rather, it will make it worse. You should focus on relevant content and healthy websites to get backlinks from. Backlinks from crap and lower-ranking websites will most probably pull your website down too!
For example, here’s a suggestion from Matt Cutts, former head of the webspam team at Google, who previously worked as a part of the search quality team as well, at Google.