If you have read even a single article on search engine optimization, you have seen the term “backlinks” at least a time or two. However, identifying exactly what backlinks are and finding a way to build a solid backlink strategy may seem like more effort than it’s worth. After all, can’t you simply focus on keywords and meta tags?
As important as keywords and meta tags are in search engine optimization, your blog will likely rank relatively poorly in search results pages if you don’t focus heavily on backlinks as well. As many as 55% of bloggers don’t use backlinks in their blogs. How do backlinks benefit your blog?
Table of Contents
What Is a Backlink?
There are three primary types of links that you need to be aware of. These are internal links, external links and backlinks. Each one serves a purpose. External links are links on your blog that take the reader to another page. They may be used to reference statistics or for other meaningful purposes. Internal links are links to to other pages within your website.
A backlink is a link on a different website that links to your website. While you can also create internal and external links on your pages, getting backlinks is more challenging. Another blogger has to physically create a link to your pages. Consider how picky you are (or should be) with the selection of your external links. Why would another blogger create a link to your blog? There has to be a reason. (We’ll get to that in a bit.)
The Importance of Backlinks for Blogs
Given the amount of time, effort and (potentially) that it takes to get links, is it even worth it? After all, there are many other ways to improve your blog. Building backlinks is crucial for blog traffic for a few key reasons.
SEO
The most obvious reason to develop a backlinks strategy is for SEO purposes. Google has clearly stated that backlinks are one of the most important factors that it currently uses to determine relevance. Websites that have many backlinks generally rank higher in relevant searches than those with few or no links. In fact, sites that rank well have roughly 40 to 50 incoming links to the homepage and additional links to its secondary pages.
And, of course, a higher ranking on SERPs means more traffic. More traffic means greater engagement and higher blog income.
Industry Leader
However, there are other reasons to build backlinks. When other websites link to yours, they often do so because they are using your website as a reference. In this way, the backlinks elevate the authority of your website and position you as a leader in the field. When visitors click on those links to reach your website, your status as an authority is already in their minds. As a result, visitors may stay on your website longer and click through more pages. This drives better placement on SERP as well.
Direct Traffic
Of course, not all visitors find your blog through Google. They can tap on a link on another website and be taking directly to your site. No Google needed. To optimize this benefit of backlinking, the linking site must have decent and relevant traffic.
How to Get Links
When it comes to backlinks, not all links are equal. Google places substantially more weight on the quality of backlinks rather than on the quantity. In fact, one or two backlinks from highly reputable sources can elevate your website’s search engine results ranking higher than dozens of low-quality links may.
What does this mean for you? Obtaining backlinks often takes a considerable amount of time and effort. Because quality matter, you can confidently refine your focus to obtaining a few links from reputable websites.
What Is a Quality Backlink?
A quality backlink comes from a reputable website. It’s not spammy, such as with excessive ads, and it provides a good user experience. In addition, it has these features:
- Domain Authority: A website’s domain authority is scored from 0 to 100. It takes into account keywords, meta tags, structure, domain age and links.
- Relevance: The website linking back to yours should be relevant to yours in some legitimate way. In addition to the relevance of the website, the specific page linking to yours should be highly relevant.
- Contextual: The link itself should be naturally integrated into the page’s text. It should be on-topic for the rest of the content.
- Anchor Text: The anchor text is the specific combination of words that are hyperlinked. This text ideally will target one of your page’s focus keywords.
- Length: Google prefers pages that have detailed content, and one way that it focuses on this is through the length of the content. At minimum, the page needs at least 500 words. More than 1200 to 1500 is preferred.
Some low-quality websites will link to yours independently, and you have no control over that. If a website is really dragging down your rankings, however, you can ask for the link to be removed.
Best Ways to Get Backlinks
Thankfully, there are several ways to get the backlinks your website needs. Here are some ideas:
- Guest posts with a link in your author bio
- Guest blogs with a link in the text
- Skyscraper posts, which involves creating an even better post than the top post currently in search engein results
- Free backlinking tools
- Network and build relationships with other bloggers in your field
- Citations or references
- Quotation links
- Purchase links
Should You Buy Links?
If you are looking for a fast way to skirt the system, you can research the many sources available that sell backlinks. The idea of potentially buying hundreds of links and saving seemingly countless hours in the process may seem like too good of a deal to pass up on. However, purchased backlinks are usually low-quality links that are not relevant to your website. This means that they generally may not deliver the results that you are hoping to realize.