“Backlinks” is one of the most widely used words in the world of search engine optimization (SEO).
Many bloggers who have just started blogging or building a website often find it difficult to understand the meaning of the term “backlinks”.
In this article, I hope to give you an understanding of what backlinks are, why backlinks are important for SEO, and why backlinks are crucial to your online success. You will also learn how to analyze your competitor’s backlinks and how to get backlinks for your website.
Let’s get started…
Backlinks are inbound links pointing to a web page.
When a web page links to any other web page, this is called a backlink. In the past, backlinks were the primary indicator of how a web page would rank. Web pages with lots of backlinks tended to rank higher on all major search engines, including Google. This is still largely true.
Backlink-related terms you must know
- Link Juice: When a web page links to any of your articles or your website’s homepage, it passes “link juice”. This link juice helps your article rank and also improves your domain authority. As a blogger, you can stop passing link juice by using the no-follow tag.
- No-Follow Links: When a website links to another website but the link has a no-follow tag, the link does not pass link juice. No-follow links are useless for page ranking as they do not contribute anything. Generally, webmasters use no-follow tags when linking to unreliable websites.
- Do-Follow Links: By default, all the links you add to your blog posts are do-follow links, which pass link juice.
- Linking root domains: This refers to the number of backlinks coming into your website from unique domains. Even if a website links to your website ten times, it will only count as one linking root domain.
- Low-quality links: Low-quality links are links from harvesting sites, automated sites, spam sites, and even porn sites. Such links can do more harm than good. This is one of the reasons why you should be cautious when buying backlinks.
- Internal Links: Links from one page to another within the same domain are called internal links. The process itself is called internal linking or interlinking.
- Anchor Text: The text used for a hyperlink is called anchor text. Anchor text backlinks are very useful when you are trying to rank for a specific keyword .
Benefits of Backlinks in SEO:
Before I talk about the advantages of backlinks, you need to know that backlinks have changed a lot in the past few years.
There was a time when even low-quality links would help a site rank well. But ever since Google introduced Penguin, the entire landscape of backlinks has changed.
It is important to get backlinks from quality websites and those backlinks should be contextually relevant. For example, if you have a website about fish and you are creating links from other niche websites about monkeys, those links will be useless. Your goal should be to get links from authoritative and relevant websites.
Now let’s look at why it’s important to create backlinks for your website:
1. Backlinks improve organic rankings
Backlinks help in getting better search engine rankings.
IMPORTANT: “SERP” means search engine results page. This screenshot only reflects what people see on Google.
Here is an example.
Take the topic “SEO Backlinks”.
If I enter this search term into SEMRush SERP Analysis ( a keyword research tool ), I can see that most of the high-ranking pages have a large number of backlinks:
If your content is getting links from other sites, then it will naturally rank higher in search results. If not, then you need to be proactive in building links.
Your goal should be to create links to individual posts/pages as well as a link to your homepage.
2. Faster Indexing
Search engine robots discover new web pages by following backlinks from existing web pages. Only when they discover your website can they crawl your website effectively.
If you don’t have any backlinks, it will be harder for search engine bots to find your website. Especially for new websites, it is very important to get backlinks because they help to discover and index your website faster.
3. Recommended traffic
One of the main benefits of backlinks is that they help to gain referral traffic. Basically, people who read your post are likely to click on the links in your post to learn more about the topic at hand.
Since people are voluntarily clicking on the links, they are generally more targeted and less likely to leave the page quickly (i.e., have a low bounce rate).
Typically, referral traffic is targeted and has a low bounce rate.
How to start getting backlinks:
Now that you understand how the term “backlinks” relates to SEO and how important it is, let’s learn some simple tips for getting new backlinks:
One important fact that you need to remember about backlink SEO is that it’s not *the quantity of backlinks that matters, but *the quality of your backlinks .
The question is:
What are some ways to get high-quality backlinks for your blog ?
- Write great articles
- Using the Broken Link Building Method
- Copy your competitor’s backlinks
- Creating a Piller Article
- Start Guest Blogging
- Submit to web directories
Read: 51 Ways to Get Backlinks
1. Write great articles
If you want people to link to you, you need to give them a reason. And the best reason is a great article.
If your content is useful and interesting, people will be happy to link to it.
How to write an excellent article?
Here are some suggestions to get started:
- Solve a problem. Most people read your content because they are looking for a solution. Make sure you clearly express the exact problem and teach them how to solve it.
- Make your content easy to read. Write in short, simple sentences. Make your article seem less wordy by adding formatting, headings, images, and other multimedia.
- Have a unique perspective. There is so much content on the Internet these days. How can your article stand out?
- Build authority in your article. People want to learn from people who are authorities on the subject. Also, focus on building authority on your subject.
Over the years, we’ve published a ton of articles on this blog to help you create great content in no time:
- SEO Copywriting Tips (Writing SEO Optimized Content)
- On-page SEO techniques (highly recommended)
- How to write to create a deeper connection with your readers
Once you’ve published your awesome post, it’s time to send out some promotional emails. A group of people worth reaching out to are those who have written about the same topic. Since they’ve written about the topic before, they’re more likely to be interested in your post.
To find these people, just type the article topic into Google (remember to try variations!) Gather a list of the articles that appear in the SERPs.
Alternatively, you can use a tool like BuzzSumo .
Enter the topics into Content Analyzer, do some filtering (e.g. "English only") and export the list.
Important: Such articles are based on proper research and real-life examples.
2. Start guest blogging
Guest blogging is a strategy of writing posts for someone else’s blog instead of your own.
How does this play out in terms of link building?
In short: In exchange for a free article, blog owners will usually allow 1-2 links to your site in the article.
One of the big challenges of guest blogging is finding sites to guest blog on.
To increase your chances of being accepted, you can look for sites that already accept guest posts. These sites usually have a page that calls for contributors, such as a "Write for Us" or "Contribute" page. To find these sites, you can use Google's advanced search operators.
There are a few search operators you can use:
- [your_topic] "Write for Us"
- [your_topic]"Become an author"
- [your_topic] "Guest Post"
- [your_topic] "Guest Post"
- [your theme] inurl:contribute
From there, just follow the instructions to submit your pitch.
Another approach you can take is to look for guest blogging opportunities in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer .
Here’s why: If a site has written about a topic before, then they’re obviously interested in that topic. So even if they don’t have a “write for us” page, they might be willing to accept a guest post on that topic.
First, enter any word/phrase in your field.
Check the box for "One article per domain" to get a list of unique domains you can write articles for. You can also add more filters to narrow the list so you can pitch blogs you'd be willing to write articles for.
Some of these sites may not have an obvious "Write for Us" page. Still, most blogs will accept guest posts if your pitch or topic is good enough.
One way to find good pitch topics is to take note of common themes or topics that are already popular on their blogs.
Most bloggers feature their best articles on their website.
3. Copy your competitor’s backlinks
Your website may be new, but your competitors’ are not. This means two things:
- They may have acquired a lot of backlinks
- They do some link building themselves (so they can get better rankings)
You can use this to your advantage. Learn how they get their links, and then copy them.
To do this, you have to use a tool from SEMRush called backlink Gap.
This handy tool tells you who is linking to multiple competitors, but not to you.
In the screenshot below, you can clearly see sites that link to all the other sites of my closest competitor. What I want to do is analyze the results and find out why they are linking to my competitor and not me.
Add your competitors to the tool and click Find Leads.
Then, I’ll send out an email and see if I can get those links! I’ll be sharing email promotion techniques in future articles. You can subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when we publish guides.
4. Broken Link Building
The web is constantly evolving. Web pages change, move, or get deleted all the time. A dead link is a link to a web page that no longer exists.
Nobody likes this. Webmasters and searchers hate broken links because they lead to a poor user experience .
However, they still exist because webmasters are busy. It takes a lot of effort to constantly clean up bad links on your site.
This strategy takes advantage of that. The concept is simple:
- You found a broken link
- You recreated dead content
- You can contact people who are linking to the invalid content and ask them to link to the version you recreated.
The most important part of this strategy is finding the right “broken” content to recreate and promote. To do this, you need a tool that can analyze backlinks.
Enter the domain of an authority competitor into Ahrefs Site Explorer . Then, go to the “Best by Links” report and filter by “HTTP 404 Not Found.”
As you can see, the second page in this screenshot is no longer active, but previously had 113 dofollow backlinks linking to it. That’s a good opportunity!
The Wayback Machine tells me that this used to be a post about the differences between metaphors, similes, and analogies.
Now all you have to do is recreate this content and tell all 113 people to link to you.
5. Submit to online directories
Submitting your blog to web directories is another easy way to get backlinks.
Having said that, this method is not popular nowadays because it is not easy to find a legitimate web directory. You must especially avoid web directories that ask you to create backlinks to their website in order to get your website into their directory.
Also important: if you are using any automated direct submission strategies, stop using them immediately. Automated site submissions will cause your blog to appear as spam, and can cost you a huge loss of domain authority, or even cause your blog to be removed from search engines entirely.
Backlinks in SEO FAQs
What is an example of a backlink in SEO? When one website links to another website, the link is called a backlink. For example, if SidelinePlay contains a hyperlink to a Wikipedia page, the link from SidelinePlay to Wikipedia is a backlink to Wikipedia.
How many backlinks do you need for SEO? The number of backlinks you need for SEO success varies. When it comes to backlinks, quality is more important than quantity. Having a few high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant sites is more useful than having many low-quality backlinks. However, a backlink analysis will always reveal how many backlinks you need to get in order for your page to rank above your competitors. This isn't always accurate, but it will help.
What are bad backlinks? Bad backlinks or low-quality or harmful backlinks come from unreliable, spammy or irrelevant websites. These links can negatively impact your website’s credibility and search engine rankings, thus harming your website’s SEO.
I hope this article helped you understand the basics of backlinks in SEO and why you should start working on getting backlinks for your blog.
Are you currently acquiring backlinks for your blog? Let us know about your experience in the comments section below.
Here are some handpicked guides for you to read:
If you found the information in this article useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn!
Disclosure: Some of the links in this article contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you click through to visit us, at no extra cost to you. See how SidelinePlay is funded, why it’s important, and how you can support us.
Was this helpful?