Backlinks & Their Importance
When we talked about the Page Rank algorithm, we discussed how early on Google used incoming links to a website as upvotes that indicated the authoritativeness and trustworthiness of the website.
Backlinks are simply your website’s URL on other websites. But why are they important? Let’s discuss this first and also learn how to create backlinks for your own website.
Backlinks Help People Find Your Website
If your website is quite new, then how are people supposed to find it? Sure, Google can find it via its crawlers but the same is not true for humans.
When your website is listed on other well-known websites then people may end up on your website as well. The first goal of the backlinks is to make sure people can find them. Here are some ways you can do that:
1. Submit To Directories:
Submit to online directories which list websites in your niche. There are a lot of such directories, just a Google search away.
2. Share It Via Social Media:
Share your website links on social media. They not only help build a brand but also improve your online authoritativeness.
Backlinks Help With Rankings
This is an obvious thing when it comes to SEO. Backlinks do help with rankings. All you need to make sure is that you don’t create backlinks on spammy domains which are purely meant for only backlink trading.
Such practices are not recommended by Google and may even get your website deindexed from Google. Some of the websites where you can share content and create a link for your website along the way are:
1. Medium
Medium is a blogging website. You can share your blogs and talk about your website too. Make medium a part of your SEO process.
2. Reddit
This is another popular website where you can share your content and direct people to your website.
3. Quora
This is yet another popular website built on a question and answer framework. Make Quora also an essential part of your SEO process.
4. Popular Forums
Utilise some of the popular relevant forums for creating your backlinks. Search for a popular forum in your website niche and start sharing your website.
Backlinks Make Your Website Popular
Backlinks make your website more popular and well known in your particular business niche. Some of the ways you can make such backlinks are:
1. Guest Posts
There are lots of websites that accept write-ups from users and publish them on their websites. Your job is to find some well-known publications in your industry and reach out to them, offering them some content and some of them will link back to your website. This is the most important and effective way to make backlinks for your website.
There are authors who are associated with particular publications and you can reach out to them also.
2. Online News Publishing Websites
You can reach out to them also if you have some content that is worth publishing. Or, you can go for direct advertisements with them.
3. Keep Track Of Your Brand Mentions
If your website is associated with some big brand then you can track your brand mentions online. You can use the Google Monitor tool and you will get notified whenever someone mentions your brand name in their content.
All you need to do is reach out to them and ask them for the link so that people can follow your website easily.
Some Important Considerations For Backlinks
The text on which the link is used is called anchor text. Anchor text adds value to the quality of the backlink. We always try to keep our keyword or its close variant as anchor text for the web page we are trying to rank. Don’t put irrelevant anchor text for any link.
Also, the text surrounding the backlink is very important. If you have a paragraph about cats and you put a backlink for dogs page in it then it won’t do any good to you.
Link juice is the strength or authority passed by a particular backlink to your website.
Since in the discussion of the Page Rank, we said each backlink is assigned some weight and that weight in SEO is called link juice. Although we don’t have any measurement tool we can use to check what a particular link’s link juice is but you need to know that the more a link has link juice the more valuable it is.
How can you improve the link juice of a link? It is simple, get people to click on it.
If you have a link in the blog post and people are actually clicking on it then that link is valuable since it is helping people. Otherwise, if no one is clicking on the link, it is better to remove it or improve its anchor text or use it somewhere else.
Putting a link at the top of the page is always better since more people are likely to click on it and that will make it more valuable.
Backlinks are a big topic and we can’t cover everything in one single guide. However, you now know the foundation of backlinks and now you can explore various opportunities for backlinks on your own. You will find various tricks and tips for creating backlinks.
So far, you optimised your website content and you made backlinks for SEO. These are the two most crucial steps in the SEO process. These two are the only things that dictate how you are going to rank in search engines.
Now it is time to optimise other small things that will further improve our rankings. Next, we will talk about how we can optimize website images for SEO.
Search Engine Code Team is comprised of SEO experts and strategists having more than 20 years of combined experience. We keep testing and delivering knowledge of SEO for the community of SEO.
Leave a Reply