What Are Backlinks in SEO? How to Build Them for SEO Success

With any SEO campaign, backlinks are an integral part of the strategy. Backlinks are also known as incoming links or inbound links. These are links from a website to another website or a page. They are important for SEO as they let the search engines know that other reputable websites vouch for your site’s content. This knowledge increases your site’s visibility and ranking on search engines.

Recent study reports highlight the importance of backlinks for SEO. It is estimated that 67.5 percent of SEO experts agree that backlinks can significantly boost a site’s search engine rankings. Moreover, top-ranking pages on Google are believed to feature around 3.8 times more backlinks than those without them. 

Types of SEO Backlinks

• Do-follow Backlinks

These are the foundations of SEO using backlinks. These backlinks enable search engines to follow them while passing the links to your website. 

Acquiring do-follow backlinks will help improve the website’s domain authority or domain rating and help to improve keyword ranking. To get do-follow links, you should create profiles on reputed websites and reach out to other websites. 

• Unnatural Backlinks

These links are created artificially to analyze page rankings. The use of unnatural backlinks is a popular black-hat SEO technique. Therefore, it might harm the reputation of your site.

• Editorial Backlinks

These links occur naturally from other websites as a response to high-quality content or traffic. These are the most useful types of backlinks as they are rewarded organically to your site.

• No-follow Backlinks

These do not pass any link asset. They are still valuable for diversifying your backlink profile.

• Paid Backlinks

These links are usually purchased from other sites. It can be a risky affair and could lead to penalties if the links are not derived from reliable sources.

• UGC or User-Generated Content Backlinks

These backlinks are derived from user forums, comments, or social media posts. These are usually identified as no-follows and diversify your social profile to drive user engagement.

Importance of Backlinks for Website

Backlinks are the foundation of any SEO strategy as they play an important role in boosting a site’s visibility and search engine rankings. Typically, backlinks bring forth a vote of confidence from a reputed site to another website. 

Every backlink tells search engines that other authoritative websites consider your site’s content credible and valuable. For instance, a study report reveals that websites featuring increased quality backlinks usually appear on the first page of search engine results. 

Moreover, quality backlinks also improve domain authority and referral traffic for your site. Eventually, this leads to improved conversion opportunities and brand recognition. According to a study, backlinks from reputed sites like BBC or Forbes can increase your site’s visibility and impart a high level of trustworthiness among readers. 

Benefits of Backlinks 

1. Website Authority

When your website features backlinks from reputed websites, search engines perceive your site as valuable and authoritative. Each backlink boosts perceived website authority to help with SEO and online reputation.

2. Improved Search Engine Rankings

Your site’s search engine rankings improve on SERPs with valuable backlinks. Search engines like Google consider backlinks as reliable sources for your site’s credibility. The more high-quality links will point to your website, the more your site will rank for relevant queries.

3. Organic Traffic

Backlinks are capable of driving organic traffic both organically and indirectly. When your site receives a backlink from a reputed website, it leads readers directly to your website content. 

How to Build Backlinks Effectively

The development of quality backlinks is an important SEO strategy to improve your site’s ranking and visibility on the SERPs. Here are some useful strategies:

1. Guest Posting

It serves to be a useful step to generate quality backlinks. When you write high-quality content for reputed websites within your niche, you can include quality backlinks from their site to your site. This serves a dual purpose: driving traffic and improving credibility. While guest posting, make sure that you deliver high-quality content that is relevant to the audience of the host site. 

2. Shareable Content

You can attract quality backlinks naturally by creating content that is informative, valuable, and engaging to the readers. This will include the generation of detailed guides, video content, and infographics related to your industry. When you create shareable content, it allows other reputed sites to link back to your resources. This, in turn, boosts backlink count and your site’s authority. 

3. Broken Link Building 

You can use broken links on other sites and suggest your site as an alternative to improve SEO efforts. 

This will help your site gain a backlink and assist the host website in improving its user experience. 

4. Avoid Black Hat SEO Strategies

When you wish to build quality backlinks, you should refrain from using black-hat SEO strategies like using link farms or buying links. These practices could lead to major penalties from search engines or even de-indexing. 

What Factors Influence the Value of a Backlink in SEO?

There are some elements that affect the quality of a backlink. This, in turn, can influence the overall effectiveness of backlinks in improving your site’s rankings.

1. Domain Authority

DA is a factor developed by Moz to predict how well a site will rank on the SERPs. A backlink from a site having a high DA is considered more reliable than that of a site with a lower domain authority.

2. Relevance

Relevance is another important factor in determining the quality of a backlink. Links from sites that are closely linked to your industry or niche are more effective than those from irrelevant sites. For example, a backlink from a reputed tech blog to a tech startup website is more useful than the one from a news blog.

3. Anchor Text

The anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. This also impacts the value of the backlink. SEO experts suggest that the anchor text should be relevant to the page you wish to link to. This will help search engines analyze the content of the linked page. 

4. Link Placement

Ideally, it is suggested that the backlink should be embedded within the body of the content instead of the sidebar or the footer section. When you place links within the main content body, it is regarded as more strategically placed and naturally embedded, thereby holding more value.

How to Monitor and Optimize Your Link-Building Efforts

1. Tracking Your Backlinks

With the help of tools like GSC (Google Search Console), you can monitor your backlinks. These tools and platforms enable you to observe which sites are linking to you and the overall quality of those links. 

2. Analyzing Backlink Performance

You can analyze the performance of backlinks by evaluating important metrics, like search ranking improvements, website authority, and improvement in referral traffic.

3. Refining Your Strategy

Depending on your analysis, you can update your link-building strategy to harness the most effective method. For instance, if guest posts are delivering better results, you can improve your efforts in that area.

Best Practices for Building Backlinks

1. Emphasize Natural Link-Building Tactics

Search engines, like Google, prefer organic link-building strategies over black-hat SEO strategies like spamming or buying links. To achieve the same, you can develop relationships with authoritative websites by collaborating on specific projects, guest posting, or sharing resources. 

2. Look for Authoritative and Relevant Sources

When you obtain backlinks from authoritative and relevant sources, they will always hold more value with respect to SEO. Reliable tools like Ahref’s Domain Rating or Moz’s Domain Authority can help you search for authoritative sites within your industry. Aim to obtain links from these sources as they improve search rankings. 

3. Create Content That Attracts Links Naturally

When you wish to achieve organic link building, aim to deliver high-quality optimize content. For example, you can consider developing case studies, comprehensive guides, or visually appealing elements like infographics. 

4. Engage with Industry Experts and Influencers for High-Quality Mentions

When you collaborate with industry experts and influencers within your niche, you can boost your backlink profile naturally. These groups have a large target audience base. When they link to your content or mention about it, you will get credible backlinks.

5. Make Sure Backlinks are Relevant

When it comes to authority, relevance plays an important role. Links from irrelevant sites might appear spammy and will harm your reputation. 

Practices to Avoid When Building Backlinks

Here are some tactics to avoid when you wish to build backlinks:

1. Buying Backlinks: Purchasing backlinks is a major violation of the essential guidelines for most search engines. It could lead to severe penalties. 

2. Excessive Exchange of Links: You should share links only occasionally. When you exceed the limits, it might appear as a manipulative strategy. 

3. Keyword-stuffed Anchor Text: When you use anchor-stuffed, overly-optimized anchor texts in your content, it might result in search engine penalties.

4. Using Spammy or Irrelevant Sites for Backlinks: If you obtain backlinks from irrelevant or spammy sites, it will harm your site’s SEO and reputation.

5. Link Farms or Private Blog Networks (PBNs): If you engage with link farms or PBNs, it will severely impact your SEO. This is because these groups of websites aim to manipulate page ranks indirectly. 

Conclusion 

Backlinks are like recommendations from other websites. 

They serve as the ultimate vote of confidence from one site to another. They help improve your site’s authority and ranking on the SERPs. Still, quality and relevant backlinks are more important than quantity backlinks. 

FAQs

1. What is backlink strategy?

Backlink strategy is the process of acquiring high-quality links from other websites to your own. These links act as “votes of confidence,” signaling to search engines like Google that your website is valuable and trustworthy, which can improve your search engine rankings.

2. Can you do SEO without backlinks?

Yes, you can do SEO without backlinks, but it’s significantly more challenging. Search engines, especially Google, consider backlinks from other reputable websites as a vote of confidence, indicating the quality and authority of your website.

3. How many backlinks are good for SEO?

When it comes to SEO, the quality of backlinks is more important than the number of backlinks on your site. 

4. What are inbound and outbound links in SEO?

Inbound links are links from other websites to your site. Conversely, outbound links are links from your site to another website to improve user experience. 

5. What is the difference between no-follow & do-follow backlinks?

Typically, do-follow links transfer authority from one website to another. On the other hand, no-follow links tell search engines to not pass any authority to the linked website.