What are Backlinks? Everything You Need To Know About Backlinks

A backlink is one of the most common words you’ll ever read in today’s blogs about search engine optimization. A lot of bloggers who have started a website or a blog often struggle to understand what this word even means.

In this post, I hope you get a bit of understanding of what backlinks are about and why they are essential to SEO and your online success. You’ll also learn to analyze your competitor’s backlinks and how to acquire them.

So let’s get started.

1. What are backlinks?

So what is backlinking? In a layman’s term, a backlink is a link which points back from one page to another page. These come in different forms such as graphics and textual.

They can appear in a website’s footer or header, banner, a blogroll, blog post, or within an article. They even come as comments.

When you generate a lot of high-quality backlinks, the position of your site in SERP enormously increases.

2. Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are essential at improving the SEO rankings of a website. These influence the relevance, popularity, and domain authority of a website.

The more high-quality backlinks that you create for you and your client’s site, the better chances you get at ranking high for your desired keywords.

The crawler of a search engine takes a closer look at the quality and number of backlinks pointing back to your domain to determine your pages’ overall relevancy. You can use a backlinks checker to see what backlinks you have.

Backlinks indicate the relevance and importance of a particular website. In a nutshell, backlinks are essential because:

• They help your pages get indexed by Google faster.
• They attract referral traffic.
• They improve your organic rankings in search engines.
• They help users better navigate through pages and websites online by feeding them with relevant and additional information.

3. Two Types Of Backlinks

There are two major backlink types that you can acquire namely nofollow and dofollow link. Dofollow links influence ratings while nofollow links are usually just used as a source of traffic.

This is what they looks like in HTML:

1. <a href=”https://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”> Link Text </a>

2. <a href=”https://www.example.com”> Link Text </a>

Dofollow links are what everybody is after. After all, it passes authority from one page to another and helps build a site’s rankings in SERP. For your backlink to work, it has to feel organic.

It should have additional and relevant information which helps the reader understand the subject a bit more. The anchor text should be natural and built around a keyword.

In comparison, a nofollow link doesn’t have much influence on building the authority of your page in search. It does not pass any real value or link juice to your backlink profile. This is why a lot of experts consider them as useless. But they’re not that useless.

4. How to get backlinks

Backlinks relate to SEO, and if you want to boost your rankings, these are important. Here are a few techniques to get backlinks aside from SEO backlinks builder.

• Write excellent articles that are worth linking to.
• Use a broken link building method.
• Replicate the backlinks of your competitors.
• Create pillar articles.
• Start guest blogging.
• Submit to web directories.

Helpful Resources:

1. 16 Best (free) AMP – (Accelerated Mobile Pages) WordPress Plugins

2. 16 Best Free SEO WordPress plugins for your Blogs & websites

3. JavaScript SEO: Server Side Rendering and Client Side Rendering

4. 16 Best SEO Practices For Web Developers & Search Marketers

5. The 15 Most Important On-Site SEO Issues & Errors