What is a backlink?
Essentially a backlink is essentially a link from another website linking to your website. The accepted definition from Wikipedia is…
“A backlink for a given web resource is a link from some other website to that web resource. A web resource may be a website, web page, or web directory. A backlink is a reference comparable to a citation.”
Backlinks are considered by Google as votes for your website and directly impact your website rankings.
How do I get backlinks?
Getting backlinks on your website can be easy and very difficult…confused? Let me explain, Google uses complex algorithms determine how authoritative each website is.
Imagine that your friend has just launched a website and linked to your website from one of their recent blog posts.
But what if The BBC published an article linking to your website?
We (and major search engines) perceive those two websites as having different levels of “authority.” The BBC has a world-famous website trusted by millions of people around the world. While your friend’s new website barely gets any visitors in comparison.
Put simply not all backlinks are equal, the authoritative weight of any link is extremely important for ranking.
Earning your links
The easiest Backlinks to obtain include, Business directory submissions, Social profile creation, Blog commenting, Posting to forums, communities & Q&A sites, Creating job search listings etc
Earning links when other people link to the pages on your website without you having to ask them to do so. This obviously doesn’t happen unless you have something truly outstanding that other website owners would genuinely want to mention on their websites.
But people can’t link to articles or pages that they don’t know exist. So no matter how awesome your page is, you’ll need to invest in promoting it. And the more people see your page, the higher the chance that some of them will end up linking to it.
Here are a few tactics and strategies that you can consider,
Linkbait (or linkable assets), data studies, infographics, maps, surveys, awards, podcasts, interviews, expert roundups, content promotion etc.
Earning links is arguably the easiest and the most effective way to get them.
Where should my backlinks point too?
You need to consider where you would backlinks point when building links, there are three destinations where you can point them:
- Your homepage.
- Your linkable assets.
- Pages that you need to rank high in search results.
And quite often the pages that you need to rank well are also the hardest ones to get links to. That’s because people prefer to link to informational pages where their audience can get value for free, rather than commercial pages where their audience are likely to part ways with their cash.
Ranking your less exciting pages?
Most SEO experts agrees that you should leverage the power of internal linking to help your “boring pages” rank better.