If you have a website, you should know the importance of ranking among the top few search results. Every website owner wants to rank high on the search results. However, it is not possible for the search engines to accommodate all the websites on the first page. Only a limited number of websites can figure on the first page.
So, how can you improve your organic ranking on the search engines?
As search engines frequently change their algorithms, it becomes imperative for the website owners to put in place a smart SEO strategy to climb the search engine rankings. SEO or search engine optimisation is a method which is used to increase the quantitative as well as the qualitative traffic to your website through organic or unpaid search engine results. A lot of factors influence your search engine rankings, but backlinks are one of the most vital of them all.
In case you want to climb the search engine ladder, you need to make sure that your website has relevant backlinks. That is the reason why you need to know about backlinks.
So, what are backlinks?
A Backlink or an inbound link is a link from an external website to your site. It is the building block of an effective SEO strategy because these are links that are directed towards your website. In simpler terms, when a website or a webpage has a hyperlink, which redirects to your website is referred to as a backlink.
Search engines, especially Google, considers your website reliable and trustworthy if it has several backlinks that come from reliable sources. And, one thing which website owners need to understand at the start is that the quality of the backlink is much more important than its quantity.
Backlinks are considered to be of high-quality if they come from authority websites that have some relevance to your content. Backlinks that redirect to your website should be real, and it needs to come from a similar niche. For example, if your website is about cookery and your page is linked to a furniture website, then these links become irrelevant because they negatively impact your search engine rankings.
And, why are they important for your website?
Backlinks are known to improve your search engine rankings provided they are of high quality. As mentioned earlier, search engines including Google consider your website to be more trustworthy, reliable, and relevant if they have links that come from authority sites related to your business. But make sure that you never get backlinks from spammy, harvested, or paid sites. Buying backlinks randomly will not improve your search engine ranking; it can only have a negative effect.
Search engines (including Google) measure the relevancy of a website through the number of backlinks it contains. Search engines (including Google) consider that if a web page is linked by other relevant pages several times, then it has the quality and should rank higher. And, this is the main purpose of building relevant backlinks. Also, when you get a backlink from a website, it passes the link juice to your website which is what helps you climb the search engine rankings. Another benefit of creating quality backlinks in SEO is that it helps you to increase your organic traffic.
Hence, if you want to climb the search engine ranking and increase your organic traffic, then you should concentrate on creating relevant backlinks for your website.
Faster indexing is another big advantage of relevant backlinks in SEO. Relevant backlinks in SEO helps your pages to get indexed faster on the search engines. Websites that have several relevant backlinks are picked up faster by the search engine bots for indexing. Hence, if you want Google to index your pages faster, you should create high-quality backlinks for your website.
Types of backlinks
There are two types of backlinks – dofollow backlinks and nofollow backlinks.
- Dofollow backlinks – Natural linking of one website to another without putting the no-follow tag is termed as a dofollow backlink. These type of backlinks (dofollow backlinks) pass on the link juice to the website which helps it in climbing the search engine ranking.
- Google crawlers crawl the dofollow backlinks which help Google bots to reach the page that has been given the link. That is the reason why dofollow links are considered vital in search engine optimisation. Every link by default that is given to a website is a do-follow link.
- Nofollow backlinks – Backlinks that contain the no follow tag are referred to as no-follow backlinks. These links are not all that relevant from the SEO perspective.
- Google crawlers ignore the links with no tags when they crawl a web page. Google crawlers don’t bother to crawl to the linked website via the nofollow link. Also, nofollow backlinks are not relevant in search engine optimisation, and it does not improve your page rankings.
How to create relevant backlinks?
Now that you know that creating relevant backlinks is vital for your SEO strategy, here are some ways that you should adopt to get relevant backlinks for your website:
- 1. You should create high-quality content for your website that is relevant to your audience. When you produce high-quality content, people with related content will automatically link back to your site, and this is the most natural way of getting a relevant backlink. Also, high-quality content will attract many followers who can share your content on various social media platforms.
- 2. Get into a habit of writing guest articles on top forums and blogs.
- 3. Look for influencers in your niche and request them to review your products on their site.
- 4. You also need to leverage high-quality Q&A sites like Quora to increase traffic to your site. You can participate in the discussion boards and link it to your blogs. You can comment on these sites to engage with your prospects and increase your brand awareness.
- 5. You can use tools like SEMrush, Open Site Explorer, Open Link Profiler, and Ahrefs to review backlinks of your competitors and fine-tune your SEO strategy. Here are some more ways that you can adopt to get relevant backlinks for your website.
- 6. You can start relevant threads in Forums, and then link it to your blog posts.
- 7. Work on broken link building. Usually, every link on a website links to another page online. However, since websites frequently move their content around, some of the links ultimately break or point to pages that are not in existence (the 404-page error you sometimes see when you click a link). When you find broken links on other websites, try and identify the content they referred to originally, then offer the site the chance to replace the broken link with a valid link. Use Ahrefs Broken Link Checker to get to the links that are not working. You can go to Internet Archive to find out what the original post was about and if you generate relevant content for that broken link, then you can offer the owner of the site to replace your link with the link that is now broken. This is how you get a backlink by working on the broken link building exercise.
- 8. Social bookmarking is also important (because they are considered as backlinks); hence target sites like Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.
- 9. Submit your blogs posts on blogging communities (BlogEngage, Medium, Ampower, etc.)
- 10. You can also visit Answer sites and ask questions related to your blog, and then link to your blog in your questions.
- 11. You can also submit your blogs to top blogging directories.
Backlinks, therefore, are an integral part of an SEO strategy. To get on top of the SEO game, you need to focus on creating relevant and top-quality backlinks for your website.
For an effective backlink building strategy, you can get in touch with vStacks Infotech now. vStacks Infotech is a one-stop shop for all your digital marketing needs. Also, if a smart SEO strategy is what you want for your website, we have you covered.
