Emma Gibbons
Confused about backlinks, how they are curated and why they are useful?
Backlinks are a key component of SEO and can help your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Because of this, webmasters are doing all they can to get ahead of the game and keep their websites ranking as highly as they can on Google.
Businesses are always trying to be one step ahead with their SEO, and backlinking is a way to keep you that extra step ahead.
Simply, backlinks are hyperlinks to your website, that are linked from another website. These are also known as inbound links.
They are pointing readers on other webpages back to your valuable content, which in turn, boosts your ranking.
Google will then accept that your website is a reputable place for information – result!
What’s Behind Backlinking?
Let’s look at the finer details.
Backlinks are made up of two crucial elements.
- The anchor text.
- The URL to your website.
Anchor text is the clickable part of the text. Here are some key features of a strong anchor text:
- Short phrasing e.g. “click here”.
- Aesthetically stands out from other text e.g. using underlining or bolding.
- Avoiding of “key word stuffing” to manipulate your site ranking.
Anchor texts are short, key phrases used to attract the reader. Anchor texts are designed to stand out from the rest of the text, both in the choice of wording used and aesthetically. Stylistic elements such as underlining and changing the colour of the text (often making it blue), enable the phrase to stand out both to readers and to Google.
Because of this, if there are multiple anchor texts in one paragraph, also known as keyword stuffing, this can look overwhelming to the reader and like spam to Google.
The URL is the hyperlink that links back to your website. This will best perform if optimised for key words that make it easy to see where the link is going. This will encourage readers that are hovering over the anchor text to click on the link and head to your website.
Put simply, would you walk into a shop if their front window was cramped and overloaded?
No.
Avoid doing this with your anchor text and URL and watch the click rates rise.
To Follow Or Not To Follow
To build successful backlinks, you will want to ensure the link is DoFollow, not NoFollow.
What do we mean by this?
Nofollowed links are hyperlinks with a rel=“nofollow” tag.
In short, Google does not rank NoFollow links, meaning they won’t count towards your race to rank the highest. Therefore, they hold no value.
NoFollow links are a great way to stop spam links gaining benefit from your website, such as via comment sections. These will automatically be NoFollow and therefore hold no value.
What Are The Benefits Of Backlinking?
Creating backlink relationships with other websites is a great way to optimize your website. Ultimately, the better-quality backlinks you have towards your website, the higher your website will rank on Google.
Google’s algorithm PageRank considers the number of backlinks pointing to a webpage when determining its ranking. In short, this means that pages with more high-quality backlinks tend to rank higher in SERPs than those without them.
Backlinking also helps increase referral traffic to your website and drives more people to discover what you have to offer. Using an appropriate anchor text can draw attention to your website from an existing page. Once you are working with websites you trust to provide a great backlink for you, your referral traffic will only improve. Backlinks build credibility by showing that other sources find your content valuable enough to link to it.
Furthermore, by diversifying where you get link traffic from, you can capture more potential customers who may not have found you otherwise. While you aren’t topping SERPs, you can aim to gain traffic from those who are. It’s all about making connections.
How Do You Create Quality Backlinks?
Building quality backlinks requires you to build relationships with webmasters that will benefit you. It requires you to reach out and ask to collaborate with webmasters in order to benefit from referral traffic.
Creating interesting and valuable content is the first step in gaining the benefits from backlinking. Creating helpful content means readers will find value in clicking the anchor text.
Once your content is optimized to be as helpful as possible to the reader, make sure to choose quality connections. Linking your own website to spammy or bad quality websites will not improve your ranking, and it might have a negative effect on your company. Ultimately, backlinking is about quality, not quantity.
Tip: You can reach out more easily than ever before by using social media. This allows you to build connections with the click of a button.
Backlinking, The Basics And The Benefits
Above are the basics of backlinking, how to use them effectively and the benefits they can have for your website.
By choosing a short, SEO beneficial anchor text, you can attract readers to your website. Also, using a concise URL to your target page will further encourage readers to your website.
Ensuring the links to your page are DoFollow is also a crucial point in using backlinking successfully.
When taking all of these points into consideration, and putting them into practise, backlinking can successfully boost your rankings on SERPs and your overall SEO.
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