What is a Backlink?
The most notable term about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is Backlink that simply refers to a hyperlink, directing a link from a webpage to your own webpage. Also known as Inbound link, these links are vital to determine a website’s ranking and its popularity among other websites. It’s important for the people involved in SEO to be good at methods, used to boost the number of visitors to a web page by gaining a high ranking placement in search results page of a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing and more. By understanding the concept of Backlinks, we are able to better understand the scope of backlinks and their role in enhancing the performance of SEO.
However, only to get more backlinks to the website is not significant, the relevancy of the website content, from which your backlink is coming, also matters. Otherwise search engines consider them as less relevant. Thus, higher the relevance of the backlinks, higher would be their quality. The number of backlinks determines the popularity while relevancy of the backlinks determines quality which definitely increases the ranking of a website. Hyperlinks can be found in two kinds, one is internal and another is external. Internal links link your web page with different pages of your own website. For an example, your home page has a link for your contact web page, that link is internal. On the other hand external links link your site from separate websites. If you direct your link to Facebook then it would be external.
Why are Backlinks Essential in SEO Strategies?
Search engine results page lists those websites at the top which have good number of quality and relevant backlinks. Hence, it is important to give due consideration to backlinks selection in a web page from a Search Engine Optimization perspective as well.
Meanwhile, you cannot expect visitors to your website by just creating it; you need to tell the world & more importantly your target audience about your website and influence them to visit it. Through backlinks you direct your targeted people towards a specific page of your website- be it homepage or a blog post. Search engine algorithm considers the relevancy of the backlink; if your website visitor comes from a relevant website then it would be credited as potential backlink.
From the marketing point of view also, backlinks play important role in increasing the number of visitors to your published online ad, campaign and promotional event. Many marketing companies are seeing it as a potential tool to maximize their visibility and popularity online to reach out to the widely dispersed customers familiar with internet technology. Therefore, hyperlink is very important to be considered for increasing the ranking of a website.
Useful Terms in Backlinking Process
Reciprocal link: Reciprocal link exchange is used to boost a site’s ranking with a sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster posts a link on his website that directs to another webmaster’s website and vice-versa. We must be careful while using reciprocal links as search engine keeps tracking the relevancy of the link thus be wary of a bad or irrelevant link.
Backlink bombing: in order to increase number of webpage links. Backlink bombing points to a trend in which webmaster has more than one website, he interlinks his multiple websites on the same IP address. This trend sometimes arouses suspicion among IT watchdogs.
Link Juice: When a website links to another one, it passes link juice which defines the amount of positive ranking factors a website has. Ideally, link juice should be distributed evenly among all web pages of a website. It calls for avoiding concentration of all links to the website home page. Using a nofollow tag, the link juice can be stopped to pass through.
Do follow and Nofollow link: While crawling through a website, a user comes across many hyperlinks; however, he may wish to make few links as no-follow by using rel=”nofollow” in the anchor tag of the hyperlink. These links are termed as no-follow links and all other usual links are known as do-follow links.
Linking Root Domains : It means the number of backlinks to a website coming from a web page. Even if more than one link is coming from a single web page it would be considered as one linking root domain.
Low-Quality Links: These kinds of links can harm your site’s ranking rather than doing any good. Links which come from automated sites, spam and harvested sites are considered as low-quality links.
Anchor Text: The clickable text in the hyperlink is known as anchor text. Hyperlink, ideally, should have a relevant linking text rather than a generic text. Although, blue underlined anchor text, is most commonly seen hyperlink as it is a web standard. However, it can be changed to other colors through HTML code.
Factors That Influence Your Backlink Strategy
Competitor’s analysis:
One of the ways is to search and identify sites where you wish to target your backlink. Firstly, see those websites which your competitors are using and find out their URLs. For conducting a research on this you can use websites such as MajesticSEO or the Open Site Explorer. It makes your job easier to find ideal websites to fit your content.
Unclaimed link opportunities:
Track those websites which mentions your site as a reference or cited one of your web pages without providing an attributive link and contact the webmasters to ask them to link to your pages correctly. You can do this by tracking your brand name and other famous keywords with the help of Google Alert.
Write relevant articles:
This is the best and most simple way to get backlinks for your web page. It can be done by proper research and analysis. Articles have great potential for getting backlinks from other websites as references.
Start commenting:
It is one of the easiest and quick ways to get backlinks for your web page. You can comment on do follow blogs and forums and make sure that those blogs and forums are relevant to your own web page. Commenting is helpful to get more connected and traffic with high search engine visibility.
Inserting press releases:
If you have any news worth to press release then share it to get quality backlinks. An online press release can help you to climb up in the search results ranking which will further increase website visitors to your web page.
Maximize the linking of your web page:
You can link your web page to yahoo answers, Quora HQ discussion board, forum signature and many more. As much your web page linking increases, as your visibility increases.
Helpful Tools for Backlink Building Campaign
Domain Stats Tool: It helps you to track your backlinks to know which links are directing back to your web page. As this tool provides potential information such as all backlinks of a domain, website traffic, number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google and yahoo, and Dmoz listings.
Backlink Builder Tool: As we know that only to have a good number of backlinks is not enough to link your web page, quality of backlinks also matters. Thus, this tool provides you list of websites which have relevant theme to your ones and can, likely, add your website link to their web page. It helps you to make your job of building backlink campaign easier and faster.
Backlink Anchor Test Analysis Tool: Powerful and easier tool to help you find out what text should be used to build backlink for your site. It provides you a quality anchor text- clickable text that will ultimately boost the relevancy of the backlink.
Points to Remember in Backlinking
If you are creating effective and relevant content there are chances of easily getting links that are directed to your website. However, to make your website more competitive in the search results, you need to push extra mile by building quality backlinks to your website.
Key points required while dealing with backlinking:
- Backlinks should not be paid in any form.
- They should come from a website which has high quality relevant content.
- Avoid site wide footer link which are posted at the bottom of the web page.
- Backlinks should be developed slowly. If you build them too quickly, your chances of coming into suspicious radar will increase and trigger penalty from search engines.
Conclusion
The crucial importance of Backlinks in optimizing your SEO efforts makes them essential to understand and use, in order to climb at top ranking in search engine results. Approximate 80 percent of the weight is given to backlinks by search engine ranking algorithms. It can be a big opportunity to build and maintain a higher ranking in search results page.