To differentiate your brand in the market, you must look for creative ways to expand your reach in the market. One of the ways to do that is search engine optimization (SEO) as it helps you bring more quality traffic to your website. However, SEO is a comprehensive and multifaceted approach and involves a lot of ranking factors. These factors ultimately affect the overall performance of the businesses in SERP rankings.
One such ranking factor is backlinks in SEO, which indicate to Google that your website has authority. Also called inbound links, backlinks are basically links that connect your website to another website. They essentially help you direct traffic from other websites to your website. In this blog, let us explore backlinks in detail and analyze why they are so important for the SEO strategies.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks can be defined as the links from other websites that bring traffic to your website. From the SEO point of view, backlinks are highly important because they signal the search engines about the authority of your website. Higher quality and quantity of the backlinks can enable you to achieve better SERP rankings.
Backlinks are a part of off-page SEO and work as endorsements from other websites. Essentially, other websites can include relevant links to your webpage to enable their audience to check out your content. You can naturally get backlinks by creating niche-specific quality content, or proactively build backlinks using effective strategies.
Why Are Backlinks Extremely Necessary for SEO Point of View?
Backlinks in SEO are vital for your website growth strategies in multifaceted ways. Essentially, if you want to get decent rank in the search engine results, it is important to differentiate your website. Many businesses do some form of search engine optimization, but small businesses mainly restrict themselves to on-page SEO efforts.
SEO backlinks enhance your rankings because the quality and quantity of such links indicate reliability and authoritativeness of the website. It does not guarantee higher rankings since there are other factors as well such as on-page SEO and loading speed. However, for relevant search terms, it vastly improves the likelihood of your website rankings. Furthermore, it increases your chances of being found easily on the search engines.
Generally, it has been noticed that quality and quantity of backlinks directly translate into higher rankings on search engines like Bing and Google.
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How to Get Quality Backlinks?
Link generation is not entirely different than lead generation. It is important to reach out to people or make your content visible. There are many approaches you can adopt as explained in the following points:
Existing Clientele:
If you already have a relationship with retailers and suppliers, you can contact them to add your links on their website. Check out if they have a listings section and your website is included in it.
Contacting Niche Bloggers:
In numerous industries, there are knowledgeable and passionate bloggers who consistently create content for their audience. Forming associations with this audience is a great way to give yourself an online boost. They might already have a loyal audience who like a particular niche. If you are publishing content in the same niche, such bloggers might be an ideal fit for collaboration.
Find Guest Posting Opportunities:
Numerous credible brands offer guest posting services. You can look for such brands in your niche by searching with terms like technology write for us, digital marketing write for us, health write for us, artificial intelligence write for us, etc. Guest posting in top websites within your niche is one of the remarkable ways you can improve your market reputation and domain authority.
Get Backlinks from News Websites:
Getting guest posting opportunities from top media websites can indeed be difficult. This is because journalists and press websites are mainly looking for news stories. However, if you consistently publish high-quality blogs, then a few journalists might get intrigued to take a look. This is especially true if your niche somehow captures the mainstream attention. SEO Backlinks from top journalists are a great way to multiply your reach.
Get Featured in Case Studies:
When clients resolve a lingering problem with the help of your product or service, they might create a case study about it. Such success stories are a great way to show to the audience that you are always willing to improve. If your client is creating such case studies, then you can ask them to embed your link in relevant anchor text. In this way, such case studies can be valuable for both you and your clients.
What Factors Affect The Value of Backlinks in SEO?
SEO experts often say that the quality of backlinks matters much more than the quantity of backlinks. While some backlinks can improve your SEO performance, some can have no effect at all and others can negatively affect your rankings. Let us go through some of the main factors that influence the backlink value in SEO:
Follow Status:
By adding tags like “ugc,” “nofollow,” and “sponsored”, you can make sure that Google does not follow the “link.” Link follow (also called do follow) happens when Google passes link equity from one page to another. Though Google follows dofollow links, there is no certainty that they will positively improve your SEO performance. You can manually check HTML code to verify follow status or leverage a backlink analysis platform.
Page and Domain Authority:
For backlinks in SEO ensure that the referring domains are highly authoritative and credible. For example, getting backlinks from highly reputed sites such as Forbes or WHO can be a game-changer for your SEO metrics. While it is true that you will get websites with varying levels of authority in your link building journey, it is important to concentrate on high-authority websites. You can use reliable tools like Semrush to check PA and DA of your referral websites.
Topical Relevance:
This metric measures how closely the referring domains and the target domains are related to one another. It is important to link your webpages with relevant pages of the referring domains so that link feels more natural. For example, if you want to link your technical blog, then it is important to find a referring domain that covers only technical articles and products.
Conclusion
If you consider the four pillars of SEO, then they are: keyword research, on-page SEO, backlinks, and quality content. As backlinks are one of the pillars, you cannot ensure SEO success without them. Irrespective of whether you want to monetize your website within six months or ensure lasting success, backlinks are critical for you. The blog explores backlinks in SEO in detail and discusses the importance of SEO backlinks and practical steps to get quality backlinks. You can find more SEO-related blogs on our website.
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