Backlinks are also known as inbound links since they indicate traffic from another website that comes to yours. The quantity and quality of your backlinks might help you rank higher in search engines like Google and Bing. This is because your backlinks are seen as a measure of how popular your website is with users. Backlink implementation, management, and analysis are a key part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SEO methods.
The techniques of link building, creating backlinks and off-page SEO have become quite popular. That’s why many training programs of digital marketing course are including real-time projects of building backlinks and obtaining ranking.
In today’s blog, we will be discussing backlinking and how it plays an important role in SEO.
Table of contents:
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What are backlinks in SEO?
Backlinks are links from another website’s page to your own. For example, if you win an award, the awarding body may include a link to your website in its announcement. This is called a backlink.
Backlinking is divided into two categories: total backlinks and total referral domains. The total number of backlinks is the total number of links from other domains to your own. The number of referral domains indicates how many individual websites share those links.
How Do SEO Backlinks Work?
Only Backlinks can not help you with SEO but along with backlinks if you have a great Content Marketing strategy it would be a great combination. Backlinks are crucial in search engine algorithms, SEO, and your whole website growth plan.
Backlinks can be thought of as conversations between websites.
Let’s try to understand the working of a backlink with a simple example, suppose Dom is a blogger and he wrote a very interesting article about a car event.
Another blogger, Antil, mentions Dom’s essay in his post. He covers the subject on his well-known online magazine site, which results in a hyperlink to Dom’s article.
Many other websites will link to his article because the online magazine is popular. This boosts the authority of the online magazine, and Dom’s article receives a useful backlink from a renowned site. It’s a win-win situation.
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Types of Backlinks
Backlinks are of two major types, let’s discuss them in detail:
Nofollow Backlink:
during the late 90s, people realized how easy was it to generate a large number of backlinks by spamming comments on another website with links. To prevent search engines from being gamed with this approach, web developers developed the nofollow hyperlink attribute.
This nofollow tag can be applied to the HTML code of a hyperlink to communicate to search engine algorithms that the destination of the URL should not be given any additional weight or ranking.
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Dofollow Backlink:
Most kinds of backlinks have the dofollow attribute as the default. A link doesn’t need any special code to be added to it for it to be dofollowed.
Dofollow links enable Google and other search engines to direct traffic to your website or blog.
As a result, every time you insert a dofollow link on your site, it can lead back to you, increasing your authority by showing search engines what other sites, blogs, and postings are linking to you. <H2>How Does Backlinking Benefit SEO?
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What are the benefits of backlinks in SEO?
Backlinking is one of the most essential aspects impacting your website’s ability to rank in search results, along with the frequency and optimization of your content.
Domain authority and trust score are two key signals for Google’s search algorithm, which influences search ranks. Backlinking numbers have a direct impact on each of these signals.
Domain Authority: Domain authority is a number that is calculated by adding up all of the referral domains which point back to your website. The higher the authority of sites that link to yours, the higher your domain authority will rise.
Trust Score: The trust score is a measure that examines the credibility of your referral domains. You may have a high domain authority due to strong backlinks, but if Search engines such as google do not attribute high trust ratings to them, you will rank poorly. A trust score lower than your domain authority raises concerns about the quality and authenticity of the content referring back to your site from referral domains.
Backlinks from websites with low reputations or domain authority are unnecessary. Backlinking chances should be carefully considered to guarantee that they will enhance your search results rather than the other way around.
Google, for example, has classified certain domains, such as government and academic websites, as extremely trustworthy domains. Direct links from those websites will boost your trust score and domain authority significantly.
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How to create backlinks (SEO Backlinks strategy)
There are multiple ways a company can start using backlinks for better reach and a positive impact on the search engine rankings.
Let’s discuss a few of the major strategies one can adopt for backlinking:
Guest blogging:
Guest blogging is considered one of the most effective ways of creating a backlink. You can get a link back to your site by writing articles for another company’s blog.
Given the significance of trust score and domain authority, it is critical to be selective in your selection of prospective guest blogging opportunities. You should only reach out to write for websites that will benefit your domain authority and trust score, along with sites where potential customers may find you.
Fixing broken links:
Using the information you’ve gathered about potential guest blogging possibilities, you may visit these sites and begin looking for broken links in content relevant to your business or product.
If you’re reading content on another website and see a broken link, consider whether you have a blog, page, or piece of content that can cover that space. Then, you can approach the publisher or website owner about taking over the connecting opportunity and establishing a new link to your website.
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Co-marketing:
Co-marketing involves collaborating with similar brands to accomplish similar marketing objectives. When you work with the marketing team of another brand, you will reach more potential buyers and produce remarkably engaging creative campaigns.
Co-marketing allows you to promote not just the product, but you can also promote your content along with your brand. Building solid co-marketing relationships with other marketing teams with the purpose of getting relevant material & backlinks is one of the ways you can do this that will in return also increase the quality of your blog and content.
Similar to co-marketing, you can collaborate with a partner or a similar company to swap social promotion for backlinking. If the brand agrees to use your domain in their post, you can share it on your own social media network in return, thus getting mutually benefitted.
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SEO tools save your time on keyword research and data analysis. With these tools, you can assess what’s working and which portions of your strategy need to be tweaked. The finest SEO tools also provide information on how you compare to competitors.
So, the ideal tools are those that provide a huge amount of info about backlinks that you can utilize to maximize the effectiveness of your link-building efforts.
Let’s take a look at the top options.
Ahrefs:
Ahrefs is one of the greatest SEO tools for tracking website backlinks. It offers a free version that allows you to monitor up to 10 backlinks and two sites per request. Paid versions begin at $99 per month and include a comprehensive examination of the backlink profile, including dofollow/nofollow, anchor text, image backlinks, and so on.
If you ever receive a Google penalty, this tool will come in handy, providing you with an accurate percentage of anchor text on your site. Apart from standard HTML, Ahrefs’ crawler is the only one that detects backlinks in JavaScript. It also crawls 4.1 million pages per minute, so you’ll be able to see new, broken, and lost backlinks immediately.
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Sitechecker:
Sitechecker is an excellent backlink tracker for SEO and marketing managers to track and evaluate a website’s backlink profile. The tool allows you to keep track of all your backlinks, be notified when any of them are lost, and restore them.
With its simple reports, you may examine your link-building approach and do your best to improve its effectiveness. You can see the most popular anchors used by other websites that point to your website. Furthermore, you can see which landing pages have the most links and how these links affect your website traffic.
RankActive:
RankActive is a relatively new product in the market that assists you in discovering backlinks in real time. It contains a massive in-house backlinks database and graphs and tables that demonstrate which links are beneficial to your SEO and which are not. It not only provides a complete list of backlinks with specific data for each one, but it also displays all lost and gained links.
Coupler.io:
Coupler.io is a unique tool for monitoring your backlinks. Although it doesn’t function as a typical backlink tracking tool, it does let you compile all of your links from across all of your business divisions. This tool is ideal for small enterprises and freelancers. The ability to compile and arrange all of your data in one location for later evaluation is its best feature. Coupler.io allows you to instantly import links to Google Sheets or automate the data transfer by creating a schedule. You can also construct bar graphs, pie charts, and Venn diagrams to represent your data.
OpenLinkProfiler:
OpenLinkProfiler is a fantastic tool that can generate up to 200,000 links for every report. It includes a vast and up-to-date link database and displays which links have been active for the past 90 days.
The free version allows you to export 100 backlinks in.csv format. You can switch to the premium version if you want to export more. The tool also displays the type of linking website as well as the category of each connection. You’ll gain a general understanding of factors like link date, anchor page, and backlink influence. This data will provide you with an overview of the links that lead to your website.
RankSignals:
RankSignals is another free tool that may assist you to uncover backlinks and traffic sources from competitors to help you design your link-building plan. Using this program, you can obtain a large number of dofollow and nofollow links, as well as a large number of unique domains that go to your website.
It displays not only the site’s PR and the anchor text of the link, but also other factors such as PageRank, Alexa Rank, social signals, and unique backlinks. Discover all problematic, spammy links and choose whether or not to disavow them.
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Conclusion
Backlinks are very important for ranking in search engines such as Google. Nevertheless, not every backlink is made equal. Relevancy, location, and other factors all contribute to the quality and utility of a link.
Now that you understand more about backlinks, you can begin working on developing an exceptional backlink portfolio for your site. Always Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing and seize new possibilities as soon as possible.
Have more questions to ask, feel free to reach out to us in our Digital Marketing community to resolve your queries!