The world of search engine optimization has been evolving in a variety of ways over the years.
Some techniques have faded into obscurity and other ones have become the norm for websites. However, despite a lot of controversies, one part of SEO that has remained as important as it was a decade ago is backlinks.
Backlinks are a very specific type of links, but in this article, we will be talking about the other two link types as well: external and internal.
But before we can really get into the importance of backlinks for SEO, we need to understand what is a backlink in the first place.
What Is A Backlink?
A backlink, also known as an inbound link, is a link that is pointing to your website from another resource.
These resources can be social media pages, links for an amazon affiliate program, YouTube comments, or blog articles on other websites.
There are two reasons why backlinks are good for your SEO. The first one is very obvious: the more links you have pointing to your site from all over the Internet, the more people will click on them, increasing your website’s traffic. This is just simple math.
But that type of traffic isn’t really the biggest reason why backlinks are so important.
Backlinks Are One Of The Biggest Ranking Factors For Search Engines
They actually aid your website in ranking high on search engine results pages. This means that the more backlinks you have pointing to your website from other highly-authoritative resources, the closer you will be to that #1 spot in search results. This helps sell more trending products and rank your services better for the long-term.
In addition, if you heavily invest in link building while your competitors don’t, they will struggle to outrank you until they amass a similar number of quality backlinks for their own site.
Not All Backlinks Are Equally Valuable
Earlier, I mentioned that backlinks can be coming from practically anywhere, including social media pages and comments. However, that doesn’t mean that they will provide you with the same amount of value if placed wherever.
In fact, the only links that are very valuable for SEO are links from other, high-quality websites. All of the other types of backlinks are pretty much negligible.
So, what makes a good backlink? There are a few factors:
- The age and authoritativeness of the website linking to you;
- Its topical relevance;
- The anchor text of the link - it should be relevant, and give the user an idea of what they will find after clicking on it;
- The number of other backlinks coming from the same page as yours - more outgoing links means less “link juice” for everybody involved;
- The location of the link on the page.
The absolute best backlinks come from topically relevant, authoritative websites that have been established a considerable amount of time ago.
This leads us to the next question: how do you go about acquiring backlinks?
How To Get Quality Backlinks
There exists a variety of link-building strategies, but all of them require email outreach to some degree.
I will briefly describe three of the most popular link-building strategies that we ourselves employ in-house.
Anchor Text Strategy
This is the easiest and most beginner-friendly link building tactic out there. The premise of this strategy is very simple: you find non-competing articles that mention your target keyword somewhere in their text, and reach out to them through email asking to link your article on that anchor text.
Its upside is the fact that the reply rates are usually pretty good, and the downside is that finding a lot of prospects using this strategy can be very time-consuming.
Competitor Backlinks
My personal favorite link building strategy, the competitor backlinks technique, allows you to rack up a bunch of prospects much quicker than the anchor text one. As you may have guessed, this strategy is all about reaching out to websites that are linking to your competitors, and asking them to link to you instead.
Depending on how saturated your niche is, you can get upwards of hundreds of link building prospects within just a few minutes by simply taking a look at your competitors’ backlink profiles.
The average conversion rate is somewhat lower than that of the anchor text strategy, though.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is exactly what it sounds like - the process of posting articles on other websites with the goal of getting backlinks. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the link building book, and still works like a charm.
While the strategies mentioned above can be effective, it's worth noting that link-building can a challenging task. That's why working with professional link-building services can be highly beneficial because they help you identify relevant websites, craft outreach messages, and secure valuable backlinks that will enhance your SEO efforts.
Internal And External Links
Now that we’ve discussed why backlinks are so important and how to acquire them, it’s also important to mention what are the other two types of links, since they are also extremely important for your website’s search engine optimization.
Internal
Internal links are links from one page on a website to another page on the same website. Internal links are a good way to help people navigate your website, and they're also a good way to help search engines understand your website's structure.
It is essential to interlink all of your pages as it makes it easier for Google’s bots to crawl through your site.
To establish relations with sites for guest posting purposes, you could join a slack community for collaborative link building, like Link Building HQ.
External
External, or outgoing links are hyperlinks that point from your website to other ones.
In general, it is a good practice to link out to other relevant and highly-authoritative websites.
However, linking to low-quality pages, or having too many outgoing links can set back your site’s traffic. Imagine it like a bucket: every backlink pointing to your site is like a drop of “link juice”. Every outgoing link, however, is like a little hole in that bucket.
So, you should have a lot more incoming backlinks than outgoing ones to keep your traffic growing.
Over To You
Investing your time and resources into link building is essential to securing high placements in search engine results pages.
It is a very lengthy and resource-intensive progress, so it might be a good idea to hire an in-house link builder or seek help from link building agencies.
