Whether you’re a hobbyist blogger, an entrepreneur running a small business, or a CEO at a Fortune 500 company, you likely want your website to rank well in search results. When someone searches for the topic of your site on Google, you want them to be led to your site before anyone else’s. This means that your site needs to have “authority,” and this authority is measured by how many other sites link back to yours. These are called backlinks, and they go hand-in-hand with SEO (search engine optimization) and domain authority. We’ll walk through what backlinks mean in more detail below!
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What is a backlink?
A backlink is a link from one web page to another. The most common type of backlink is a link on the homepage of a website that links to your site and contains your keywords in the text.
Other types of links can be more subtle and still convey credibility, authority, and relevancy. For example:
- An article with a reference to your company or service (a “mention”)
- A quote from an expert in your industry which mentions your company or product by name (an “endorsement”)
- A mention on someone else’s blog post that’s related to what you do (a “resource link”).
Why do backlinks matter?
Backlinks are a measure of how popular your content is. When you publish a blog post, for example, other people will want to share it with their audience. That’s how popularity works on the internet: the more people who read and engage with your content, the more likely it is that other people will want to share it.
Similarly, backlinks are also an indicator of how influential you are as a brand or person. The more backlinks your site has received from other sites in its niche (or outside), the higher its rank in search results—and thus its perceived authority by Google. Backlinks also draw traffic to your site or blog through search engines like Google and Bing; this means that if someone searching for something finds one of your pages through a backlink link they clicked while clicking on another page, they’ll visit yours next!
Finally—and perhaps most importantly—backlinks help build brand recognition: every time someone sees a link pointing towards your site from somewhere else online (like Twitter), they might click on it out of curiosity; this could lead them right back here again! And if those visitors have friends who see these same links when visiting them too…well there goes viral marketing happening right before our eyes.”
Where do you get backlinks?
Backlinks are the links to your website that you receive from other websites. You can get backlinks in a number of ways:
- Your own site: If you have good quality content on your website, people will link to it for references and citations. This is also a way of increasing the authority of your website and improving its search engine rankings
- Other sites (content curation): You can also get other sites to link to yours by sharing their content on social media or by writing about their articles elsewhere on the internet. The more places where you provide value for others, the more likely they will be willing to reciprocate
Can you control who links to your site?
There are a few ways to get other sites to link to yours. You can ask them to link, of course; this is known as “link building.” (It’s also called “backlinking,” which—fun fact!—is a term coined by the SEO industry.)
You might also have heard of “guest blogging,” in which you write an article for another website and include links back to your site at the bottom or top of it. There are several reasons why guest blogging is controversial: some people think it’s spammy, and others feel like there are too many low-quality articles out there that dilute the quality of content on the web generally. However, if done ethically and well, you can build up good relationships with other websites by guest blogging—and those sites will be happy when they get traffic from people clicking through their links back onto their own pages.
How can you check your backlink profile?
You can check your backlink profile in a number of ways, including:
- Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools)
- Majestic SEO
- Ahrefs
- Open Site Explorer
Getting backlinks from reputable sources will help boost your rank on search engines.
Getting backlinks from reputable sources will help boost your rank on search engines. They’re also known as inbound links and direct links, depending on their source.
There are three types of backlinks:
- One-way backlinks are when another website has a link to your site on it, which means you don’t have one for them. This is the most common type of backlink, but it’s also the least valuable because it doesn’t benefit both parties (you and the other site). If someone links to your site from their website or blog post, that’s considered a one-way backlink.
- Two-way links are when you have a link in each direction—you’ve linked to another page on your site and they’ve linked back to yours—and these can be more valuable than just getting one type of link alone because they can help improve both sites’ ranking on search engines like Google and Yahoo!
Conclusion
Over time, your website’s reputation will grow and so will its following. When you have a strong backlink profile that features high-quality, relevant sources, your website is going to be viewed as more credible by search engines like Google. As such, it’ll then have a better chance of organically ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). It may seem like the acquisition of backlinks is an overly complicated process with too many steps and too many facets to keep track of—and for plenty of people out there, it is. Fortunately for you though, we happen to live in a day and age where technology exists that can help automate this process by allowing users access to comprehensive tools that make backlink building easier than ever before!
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