With the advancement of technology and the increase in online users, the number of websites is drastically increasing. However, not all websites are trustworthy and can be relied upon to get backlinks. So, concepts like E-A-T help Google check the website's trustworthiness. In the context of search engine optimization, backlinks are one of the critical factors that help in brand recognition. The more relevant and high-quality backlinks that point to your website, the better the chances of your website ranking for the keywords or search terms entered. It is highly desirable as it helps improve the performance of essential SEO metrics like impression share, website traffic, referring domains, click-through rate, etc. In this blog, we will discuss what backlinks are, how they are essential for SEO, how they can be generated, which helps build brand awareness and boost conversion rates.
What are backlinks?
The backlinks are links on a website that points to another website. Think of it as word of mouth marketing. You are more likely to trust a website that many friends have recommended to you. The links can be internal links or external links. Search engines like Google prioritize the backlinks on a page and consider it a crucial vote of confidence. When you have links to your website from another, the domain authority of your website scales. With continuous changes in the Google ranking algorithm, it is vital that the more links your website has, the better the chances of the website ranking higher on the SERPs. Whether it is content marketing, email marketing, etc., when you have referrals or when you have inbound links and outbound links, the brand authority of the referred website or user increases. When you concentrate on link building, the essential point that you focus on is that you have links to your website from authoritative websites. Similarly, when you have external links to your website, it would be best if you have links from relevant and authoritative websites.
Importance of backlinks
1. Enhances rankings - Google considers SEO backlinks one of the ranking signals for ranking content on the SERPs. In the process of SEO link building, external links are vital for a website. The external links act as the votes of popularity, which states that the website that gained the backlink is relevant. When you have links from authoritative websites, it helps enhance the ranking of the website on the SERPs, which ultimately helps to achieve desired goals like an increase in organic traffic, an increase in converting visitors to customers, etc. The more the number of backlinks from authoritative websites, the more relevant it is to your business. You need to focus on the point that you need low-quality links or links from spammy websites.
2. Boosts website credibility - Another essential benefit of having a huge number of backlinks for your website is that it boosts website credibility. When there is a huge number of backlinks from authoritative websites, the Google ranking algorithm scales the website ranking. As in social media marketing, content marketing, PPC advertising ad campaigns, etc., the focus is on gaining users’ trust. Once brand awareness among the users increases, the website's credibility increases. This leads to increasing website traffic, increasing online sales, etc. Similarly, the website's credibility increases with a surge in the number of backlinks for your website. The users see that your website ranks among the top search results, which helps increase organic traffic. So, you need to ensure that the page's internal links are working correctly. Also, to gain external links to your website, you need to ensure that the products or services you offer attract the users' attention, have the best ratings & reviews, etc., so that the referring website provides you with quality backlinks.
3. Helps search engines find new pages - With the help of backlinks, you get links to various pages on the website. It is beneficial for all size websites, be it sites with multiple pages or those with fewer pages. As you focus on SEO pagination in your plan & strategy to improve the page loading speed of your website. Similarly, your page visibility increases when you have links to multiple pages from backlinks. The more backlinks you have from high-quality websites, the better the chances that Google finds the new pages easily. It helps increase the website's page views, ultimately leading to increased website traffic. When Google follows a backlink, it focuses on crawling & indexing. Once the page is indexed Google shows the relevant page to users for the keywords or search terms entered. You also need to focus on internal linking strategy, so that the one page is linked to another as external links are covered under website backlinks.
4. Send referral traffic to your website - In your SEO backlink strategy, when you focus on generating links from quality websites, there are also users via referrals. Referral traffic to your website is traffic who visit your site via another website. They do not search for your website on the search engine but reach your web page via other websites.
When running ads on social media platforms like Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc., you focus on ad relevancy so that the target audience gets converted into customers after reaching the page. In the same way, you need to keep optimizing the landing page so that the user gets what they are looking for after being referred. In social media marketing, as you focus on peer-to-peer marketing, in the same way, when other websites trust your business offerings, they refer the traffic to your website. This is an essential point to consider in SEO and link building. In Google Analytics, you can find the referrals under “Acquisition” > “All Traffic” > “Referrals” in the left-side navigation. Some of the benefits of referral traffic are mentioned below.
a. Enhances brand recognition.
b. Introduces to new audiences.
c. Opportunity to get qualified leads.
Best strategies to get more backlinks
1. Guest blogging - To generate quality backlinks for your website, one of the most effective ways to get links to your website is to focus on guest blogging. You need to concentrate on white hat websites to avoid Google penalties and increase users' trust. With the help of guest blogging, you allow your business to build your backlink profile by inserting links to various pages, blogs, where applicable and relevant. As in PPC ad campaigns, you focus on choosing the relevant target audience, ad relevance, etc. Similarly, in guest blogging, you need to choose relevant websites and also with higher domain authority. When you have a website with higher domain authority, the chances of higher ranking on SERPs increase, leading to better page engagement, higher website visibility, traffic on the page, etc. With the help of Moz's free Link Explorer tool can be used to check a website's domain authority.
2. Engaging content - Having great content on the page helps in grabbing users' attention so that they continue reading ahead. The more engaging the content, the better the chances of page engagement, leading to increased backlinks. When the content specialists continue to write page content, they need to elaborate to the users about the topic and also focus on informing the relevant websites for backlinks. Some of the points that you can concentrate on when creating engaging content are listed below.
a. Original content - To get high-quality backlinks for your website, you need to ensure that the content is original. The unique content helps build brand authority, domain authority, etc., and avoids search engine penalties. When you have original content on your page, the user's trust in your website increases, and the website providing links prioritizes your brand name.
b. Follow trends - Whether you are running PPC ad campaigns, SEO campaigns, ecommerce PPC ads, e-commerce SEO campaigns, email marketing, etc., following the marketing trends are essential. In the same way, in SEO and link building, you need to focus on the point that you follow the trends in content marketing.
c. Videos - In SEO backlinks for your website, you need to focus on the point that you have quality videos in your content. Videos quickly grab the users' attention and are also easy to convey messages to the target audience. To get more website backlinks to your business, you need to have short-engaging videos that grab the users' attention. Videos in your SEO backlinks are beneficial because they provide visual and audio content, bolster text or other static content, etc.
3. Unlinked mentions - When focusing on SEO backlinks, using unlinked mentions in your SEO plan & strategy helps to create backlinks from the publishers that mentioned the brand name. The unlinked mentions mean that your brand name has been used in a blog post, social media posts, online marketing platforms, etc., but the link to the relevant post still needs to be added. It means that a publication that uses the brand's name does not provide a hyperlink to the brand's website. It helps with brand awareness and is a good point to be considered for your SEO site.
As in search engine optimization, there is a focus on SEO link building, similarly, focusing on SEO backlinks using unlinked mentions is a great technique. It is because the people who mentioned you are just a step away from providing you with links. It clearly means that they are willing to provide you with links, which is why they mentioned your name. Some benefits of unlinked mentions are listed below.
a. Brand mentions mean social proof - Unlinked mentions act as social proof for your business and help in building brand authority. The more your brand name is used, the better the chances of the user to know about your business offerings which ultimately helps in lead generation, driving traffic, etc.
b. Enhances trust - When you have your name mentioned on other business pages, it acts as proof that your website strongly relates to the partner website. As you focus on building user trust in your PPC ad campaign, SEO campaign, etc., users do not have second thoughts in making a purchase and move down the marketing funnel. For affiliate marketing and social media marketing, it is a good methods to achieve the desired marketing goals, as trust in the business is already there.
4. Using redirects - Another essential point that you need to focus on to gain better SEO backlinks for your website is focusing on 301 redirects. 301 is an HTTP status code sent by a web server to a browser. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one webpage or website URL to another. As it is a permanent redirect from one place to another, so all the information is also transferred.
To get backlinks from these websites, you can contact the website owners and ask them to provide links to your website. If the website deals with the products or services your business offers, you can ask them to provide links to your website through any method like guest posting, blog posting, guest commenting, etc. In your go to market strategy, you need to focus on 301 redirects and get in touch with the website owners to provide backlinks to your website. When you attempt to visit the old URL that was permanently moved, you will not find any link related to the piece of content. It provides a great opportunity to contact the business and ask them to link your website. After you get the backlinks to your website, you need to check your website backlinks to ensure that the links have been provided to the relevant page. Having useful status codes correctly signal where the content has moved allows search engines like Google and Bing to keep their index up-to-date. This is why 301 redirects are essential for SEO campaigns.
5. Analyzing competitors’ backlink profiles - To get quality backlinks to your website, you need to perform competition analysis to analyze competitors' backlink profiles. With this competition analysis, you get to know the websites that are providing links. If the website provides quality backlinks to your business page, the users' trust in your business increases. The users believe that if other websites provide links to the website, then the business's product or services offered by the business would also be authentic. As in search engine optimization, you focus on conducting keyword research, performing an SEO audit, SEO reports, etc., on knowing the status of your SEO plan & strategy. You can use tools like Semrush to check competitors' backlinks. In the same way, when you analyze the competitors’ backlink profiles, you get to know where they are getting links from, optimizing landing pages, easing users' navigation on the website, etc. You also get to know whether it is necessary to optimize images and videos(if any) on the website.
Types of backlinks
In the digital marketing world, getting quality backlinks from relevant websites is vital as it helps in building brand awareness of the website. Depending upon the type of website, there are different types of backlinks. However, these can be classified under two types of backlinks. As it is essential to understand the types of Google Ads in PPC ad campaigns, types of keyword match types, etc. In the same way, it is essential to know the types of backlinks so that when optimizing the website or improving the performance of SEO campaigns, these links can be put under relevant categories. The backlinks that you receive can be put under these two categories for acquiring top-notch links that benefit your SEO and link building plans. The 2 types of backlinks are:
a. Dofollow links - A dofollow link is a link that provides authority to the website from the origin to the destination. The dofollow links to a website act as a sign of trust that the authority providing the link is trustable and is a white hat website to the destined website. This passing of authority is called ‘link juice’. Acquiring dofollow backlinks helps in improving a website’s domain authority. The better the domain authority of a website, it helps enhance the performance of the essential SEO metrics like keyword ranking, click-through rate, search visibility, traffic to the website, etc. When you allow the dofollow links, you ensure that the website providing the link is authentic and can be trusted. It helps enhance the domain authority score, lower the spam score, etc.
b. Nofollow links - A nofollow link is a link that does not provides authority to the website from the origin to the destination. These links show that the authority providing the link needs to be more relevant to the destined website. These links do not help enhance the website's performance and thus need to be blocked. When the nofollow links are blocked, it increases the page visibility. It helps inform the search engines that the website is not relevant to them. When you allow nofollow links to be blocked, it helps block spammy websites, black hat websites, etc., which may impact the website's brand awareness. It may negatively impact the website, as you can see a drop in website traffic, lowered domain authority, etc. To make a link nofollow, add rel=”nofollow ” to the code when linking to a website.
The nofollow links need to be blocked so that your website performance is not hampered. When you block these black hat links, it is a way to inform the search engines that these websites are not relevant to your business. Once the search engines are informed, they trust the authenticity of your website, and your ranking on the SERPs is not affected. If you feel finding out which websites need to be blocked and which is not a tough task, you can outsource backlink services.
Dofollow backlinks and nofollow backlinks are ways of identifying the best backlinks for your business and you can also outsource backlink services to have the best results on your SEO marketing efforts. Using these links, you can easily inform search engines, like Google and Bing, about which links you are allowing for your business and which not.
Round off
In the digital marketing world, multiple search engine optimization factors need to be closely monitored by marketers to enhance to achieve desired marketing goals. The major advantage of online marketing over traditional marketing is that almost all the essential SEO metrics can be tracked by preparing an SEO report.
In the context of search engine optimization, backlinks are one of the critical factors that help in building brand authority. When you have backlinks from relevant websites, the authoritative websites the users trust in your business increases. In the same way, you need to ensure that you drive quality backlinks from relevant websites. You need to ensure that you have a high domain score and a low spam score to increase the website's ranking on SERPs. At times you may have seen that websites with fewer backlinks rank high while others with more numbers do not have the desired position. So, you should concentrate on the point that you have links from authoritative websites. If you find gaining backlinks a cumbersome process, you can contact SEO professionals at a digital marketing company. The SEO experts provide backlink services, and also provide you with SEO analytics, video SEO, market research, reputation management, digital analytics, etc.
References:
● 11 Creative (but 100% white hat!) ways to earn backlinks in 2022
● Backlinks: what they are and how to get them