What are Backlinks? The Complete Guide

Backlinks are a crucial factor in determining a website’s authority and ranking on the internet.

External linking is one of the important methods to be considered in order to get high traffic on your website. 

What is a backlink? 

It is also called as inbound links. It is an incoming hyperlink from one website (the referrer domain) to another website (the referent domain) via anchor text. This can be a link on a blog post or news article pointing another website. 

More traffic to your website 

Search engines like Google uses these links as a signal in deciding to rank a website. Having a good quality and relevant backlinks can increase traffic flow between websites. Only the backlinks from relevant pages are valuable. This creates another way to engage with the audience.  

Analyzing the competitor's backlink 

Analyzing the backlink profile of competitors an essential strategy to understand competitor SEO tactics. It can be learned where your competitors are getting links. These are potential link building opportunities for your own website. 

Backlink checker tools 

There are great SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush or Majestic to analyze backlink profiles of your competitors. Some tools like Ahrefs backlink checker provides a trial version to use their tool for backlink analysis. 

Review your backlinks 

Google gives you a report on external links. By checking Google Search Console, publisher can easily monitor the list of links and download a spreadsheet of all links. This list is important to analyze the quality of links. 

Nofollow links 

There might be a low-quality and spam links pointing to your site. If you are sure that these links are causing issues for you, it is recommended to eliminate them. In such cases, the link must be set as “nofollow” A nofollow backlink usually doesn’t influence ranking in Google and it is the reason why its status set to nofollow. 

Page types 

Google ranks pages, not the website. Some page types can be hard to do link building. People generally like linking to informative pages instead of commercial pages. So, blog articles can be an optimal page for linking. 

How to get backlinks 

You can ask for backlinks by reaching out to other site owners, editors, or webmasters. When it is approved, you can do backlinking. Sending an offer to write a one-off blog post for another website can be one of the smart ideas to get backlink without any cost.  

Don’ts 

There are some things to be avoided. Buying backlinks seems an option however Google does not recommend paid links since it is risky. Using too many backlinks can cause a bad credit and you can get your site penalized. The links generated through automated software can also harm your site’s credibility. 

Conclusion 

When you are working online, you are part of a big community in search engine tools. Making your article reach to other people is not an easy way and often requires a big effort and time. If you would like to make a huge impact in rankings, you might need assistance in applying SEO tactics. 

If you are looking to get backlink to your website, you can learn more about our website solution services and contact our website expert.