What are Backlinks?
What is a backlink, you might ask? They are keywords, otherwise known as anchor textAnchor text is the text highlighted by a hyperlink. The words highlighted are crucial for SEO, informing Google’s crawling bots about the content of the site linked to., within content on the Internet that link back to your website. An example of this would be if a blogger reviewed your product on their blog, and within that article there was a link to your site. Google uses backlinks to determine how popular, and therefore useful, a website is for a certain search term. This means that the anchor text used is just as important as the fact that a website is linking to yours.
To make matters more complicated, there are many factors that determine the quality of the link itself:
- The Domain Authority (DA) of the publisher.
- Page-level PageRank.
- Trust Rank, or websites of authority, like news sites, government sites, or education sites.
- The quality of your website.
Why Do You Need to Worry About Building LinksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages.?
Link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. is imperative to increase your ranking on search engine results pages. To put this into perspective, the first result on a google search result will receive, on average, a third of all traffic for that search. The second place result will only receive 17%, and if you aren’t on the first page at all, you can expect next to no organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page., meaning you must rely on PPC advertising, which can become unsustainably expensive.
Link building can be a cost-effective means of driving organic traffic to your website, and with Google looking towards user-friendly and engaging content as a means to rank a company’s website, then for the best chances possible, you should start pointing as many links to your website as possible. You can do this through guest blogging, reviews, influencer marketing, or hiring the services of a digital marketing agency.
How to Get Backlinks
There are several ways you can get backlinks. The first method everyone must use is to create quality, share-worthy content. This is the most organic, white-hat method out there, and every backlink campaign should start here. Of course, there are many other methods that you can use, including:
- Listing your local business on local directories, like Google Maps.
- Press Releases.
- Getting your company into the news.
- Guest blogging.
- Use our link building services, which can help you build a backlink campaign from scratch, ensure it adheres to Google’s guidelines, and only uses white-hat techniques.
Backlinks are one of the most important factors that Google’s Penguin algorithm uses to determine the quality of your site and how relevant it is for certain searches. You don’t, however, want to accidentally violate their terms of use, as using black-hat SEO techniques could get you de-listed from Google entirely.
Building backlinks is a long-winded task, however, if done correctly and consistently, then your patience will be paid off. When done right, your efforts could see you to the top of Google, but remember to be realistic with your goals. The more local and specific your efforts, the sooner you will see results. Being found by a niche audience is a great place to start, because it is always better to be at the top of one search, than on page three of a more generic one.
