Backlinks or Link Building is one of the most important driving factors if you want to rank organically in Google. In fact, Google themselves confirmed back in 2016, that Links, Content and Rankbrain (Their AI tool) are the 3 most important driving factors for ranking in Google.
You can check our detailed post on content and how to structure your content to rank in Google. We also have a dedicated post on where you can buy your content and what you should look for when buying content in case writing is not your cup of tea.
In this post we will cover the next most essential strategy strategy - Backlinks (or Link Building) and how you can strategize your content and links to dominate SEO with Backlinks.
What are backlinks and Why are they so Important for your SEO strategy?
Backlinks, also referred to as external links or inbound links in the SEO terminology, are essentially a link that originate from a page on an external website pointing towards a page on your website. It is not a link from an ad, but rather a link that somebody placed on their website pointing towards your website.
Take a look at the below screenshot:
This is web content from a website called Everything Tutorial. If you click on the teal box that says Tutorial Detail, it will take you to another website, shown below:
This second website is called Just Keep Shippin’, and the post is on the review of a Shopify theme. Here, the ‘Tutorial Detail’ box from Everything Tutorial is a backlink to the blog post of ‘Just Keep Shippin’.
This backlink from Everything Tutorial translates into traffic for Just Keep Shippin. When a visitor on Everything Tutorial scrolls through the content and shows interest in reading about the reviews on a Shopify Theme, they may click the link and get navigated to the webpage of Just Keep Shippin’. Considering everything tutorial is an authority website in its niche of trainings and tutorials, it probably gets thousands of visitors everyday. Even if a small percentage of those visitors show interest in the above linked post, this would result in traffic for the webpage of Just Keep Shippin. This is free and 100% organic traffic and has a similar impact to that of getting free advertising from other content creators.
Why are Backlinks so Important for SEO?
A backlink signifies an upvote or a vote of confidence from Google. The impact is similar to your social media page getting likes and shares. A backlink signifies that your content is good enough that other people are willing to share it, or, tell their audience that “hey, you should check this out!”
When people navigate to your website and read that article, it naturally sends a signal to the search engines that your content must be valuable enough that a niche website operator shared it. And this prompts Google to rank your website ahead of competition and show your web page to their users.
What are the different kinds of Backlinks? - The Two Backlinks Types
There are two types of backlinks - The Do Follow and No Follow Backlinks
Before we discuss the details and difference between them, let us first understand how Google views backlinks and why backlinks are so important for website ranking.
The Google search engine is an indexing platform. It uses robots, nicknamed googlebots or spider-bots, to crawl new and existing websites on the internet. These bots visit accessible web pages, index them and store the indexed records in the search engine database.
During the crawling and indexing process, the spider bot “reads” and crawls through the entire content of the web page.
The spiders are armed with the most up-to date indexing technology and can easily distinguish between an image, a text, or a link. If the content crawled is a link, the spiders crawl through the source of the link by opening the link and seeing what it is all about. From here, they read the contents of that newly opened web page, find more links, and so on.
This is how Google determines the relationship between websites (Link Building) and gets to know about other web pages out there.
What is the difference between DoFollow and NoFollow Backlinks?
The difference is exactly what the name states. A Do follow backlink tells Google to follow the link. When the bots follow the link, they also simultaneously index the linked webpage so that the Google Search Engines can map the backlink as “important”.
A Do Follow link signifies a vote of confidence from the link issuer which helps Google find the website and communicate in a robotic language something similar to “hey, you need to check out this content and show it to your users, too.”
Alternatively, If the link going to your website is a No follow, Google will not “open” that link. And because it does not open that link, Google will not know where that link goes. This results in that web page getting dropped from SERP results.
A do follow link sends “Link Juice” from the source webpage to your linked webpage. Link Juice is an important concept to understand for formulating your strategy to dominate SEO with Backlinks.
What is Link Juice in SEO?
Link Juice, also commonly known as Link Equity, refers to the amount of juice or equity that is passed from one website to another through backlinks. The value of the juice or equity is determined by the authoritativeness of the source i.e. the website from where the juice is flowing. Backlinks from authority websites carry more link juice and help your page rank better in Google. Search engines perceive Link Juice to be an upvote signifying that other websites value your page and consider your content as valuable and worth promoting.
Link Juice can also be used for internal link building of your pages to boost your overall ranks. When a link juice comes to a page, it can be spread around the website by internally linking other post/pages to the juiced up page. This will pass the externally received juice internally and help your pages rank better.
Link Juice and PageRank - Link Juice is often confused with PageRank which is a Google Algorithm to rank webpages in their search engine. PageRank consumes Link Juice to determine the value of the backlinks and uses that as a metric to rank.
How to determine the value of Link Juices?
Below are the basic factors considered when determining the value of the link juice:
Relevancy
The Link should come from a website which is relevant to your own webpage. A backlink from an authority website on baking would not be of any value if your website is on cars
Site Authority
The higher the Authority of the website sending the link, the more juice your backlink would carry
No. of Backlinks
The more backlinks your webpage has, from authority websites, the more it will rank
Position of backlinks
Google always values user experience more than anything else. Hence when structuring links, its better to embed them in the content where the user would find it most useful and not under the header, footer or sidebar where it would not be of much importance.
Weight of the backlink
Weight here denotes the strength of the link. This is best explained with an example. Let’s say your webpage is getting link juice from site A and B, both authority websites in the same niche. However site A provides links to thousands of other websites while Site B provides link just to you. In this case the value of the link juice would be much higher from site B than site A since all the juice would be passed on to you exclusively and not be distributed to others.
Is the link Crawable
If your link is on a page which gets blocked through robots.txt file then the links won’t be Crawable rendering the juice useless
Do Follow / No Follow Status
It is needless to say that all backlinks should be a Do-Follow link to pass on the juice or equity.
Backlink Sources: How to Get Backlinks?
Now that we have covered the basics about backlinks, types of backlinks and link juice, the next obvious question would be, how and where can you get your backlinks?
There are many ways to get backlinks. Whats important to remember is that the backlinks need to be legitimate. And like most legitimate pursuits, it takes time and effort to get good backlinks. While there are easier ways to get Backlinks, such as purchasing them from websites such as Black Hat, Upwork, Fiverr etc, our experience shows that sooner or later Google finds out about the purchased backlink and penalizes the website heavily. Hence for the purposes of discussion here, we will only discuss the legitimate ways to get backlinks.
Guest posting
There are many websites where you can guest post. A guest post is an article that you publish on someone else’s blog. In this post you can create a link back to your own website. To be able to guest post, you have to reach out to an authority website or blog (in your niche), and then offer to write a value add content on their blog. If the website owner agrees, you can post your article there and get a link back to your own webpage. If the website or blog is an authority in their niche, this could be a strong backlink.
Forums
You can provide meaningful answers to people's questions on forums like Quora and Reddit and let people know that you are an authority. In your answers, you can leave links to your website. Be careful when doing this, as people on forums hate spam, especially affiliate links.
Social media
You can share your website content on social media channels. If people link to you and the content gets shared, Google will see this as a social signal. The link to your blog post is in itself a backlink. You need to publish and republish your blog posts on social media. This can sometimes be a tiring exercise. To help manage auto posting, you can use services from websites like Hootsuite or SEMRush. They have social media auto-poster tools where you only upload once, and the tool will re-post your content.
Blogger Outreach
You can reach out to different bloggers in your niche and ask them for backlinks. These bloggers may ask you for guest post, but many will ignore you. This is natural because they do not want to take their viewers away from their website. However do not let this deter you from your pursuit. Keep trying different blogs and ultimately you will find a blog owner interested in your proposition.
Be a Reporter Source
If you know any publisher, you can act as their resource person. You can give out interviews and share your expertise. In exchange, the publisher will add a link back to your website. This is a relatively new way of getting backlinks for authority websites. If you have an article that you want to publish in authoritative blogs, you can use the services of websites such as HARO (help a reporter out). HARO connects you to authoritative domains. If the domains allow the article to be posted on their blogs, you can get an authority backlink to your blog.
Join Groups
The last method is to join groups. There are websites and facebook groups where you can reach out to other bloggers from similar niches, and then swap back links. These groups are mostly free to join, or they require a minimal fee per month as a subscription.
Pro Tip - If you are focussed on getting high-quality backlinks, focus on a maximum of three options from above. Remember - Its better to get 1 authority backlink than get 3 from domains which no one visits.
The Ideal Backlink Type
The ideal backlink is termed as a “Quality Backlink” in SEO terminologies.
What is a Quality Backlink?
Quality backlinks are links which carry a ton of juice with them.
Here are two tips to help you determine a quality backlink.
Must be a Do Follow Backlink
As discussed earlier, a Do follow backlink is the ideal backlink because it passes link juice. It tells Google to crawl your web page. A No follow link has no value for SEO, but it has value to a user.
Must be from High - Authority Site
The Link must be from high authority websites. There are many measurements of authority, and you can get these scores from SEO tools like SEMrush, AHREF, Moz, and KeySearch.
You need a domain authority checker to do this. While there is no international standard as to what score is good, the consensus is that the higher the score, the better. The score gives you relevance of the ranking parameters such as Domain Authority (DA) , Page Authority (PA) or Authority Score. The score ranges between 1 to 100, with 100 being the most authoritative. If the website linking back to you has a low-authority score, Google will still value it, but not as much as it values links from high-authority websites.
An example of an Authority Score is like this - If a doctor tells you to use his medicine to cure your illness, you will believe the doctor more than your car mechanic who happens to know something about medicine. A low-authority backlink is like the suggestion from a car mechanic—Google will not value it high.
The position of the backlink also matters. If your backlink is located on the header, footer, or the sidebar, Google is not going to pay much attention because it would be considered as an Ad.
How to use Backlinks for SEO optimization
Having walked through how to strategize and dominate SEO with Backlinks, let us walk through some tips now on how maximise your returns on the use of backlinks for SEO.
Be an authority on your Niche
You need to prove that you are a credible source of information in your Niche. This is the only way people will link back to you. The hard truth is that when people are looking for a page to link to, they would only link back to pages found at the top of the SERPs. Rank your pages and you will see your backlinks grow.
Guest post only on Niches related to yours
Do not submit guest posts to blogs whose niches are not related to yours because their readers will not be interested. Google will also not put much value on that link, even if it is a Do-Follow. If the niches are not related, the links would not not have much quality. For example, do not submit a guest post in a diabetes website if your blog is about motorcycles. It does not make sense.
Create Compelling Content
The other method is to create content that no one has done before. Or create a killer content that is far better than your competition. If people see this, you leave them no option but to share your content to their readers.
Get Backlinks from sites with Real Traffic
Guest posting is also a very reputable way to build connect with your audience and get quality backlinks from authority websites. These links carry high link juice and can boost you ranking factor.
You can also join Facebook Groups where people share Backlinks. However, the drawback with this approach is that it is too much work, and many of the people here are just spammers, or people who put up a blog just to “try it out.”
The journey to getting high-quality backlinks does not end here. It is difficult to get quality backlinks. You need to put in the effort, create great content, and build relationships with other websites. However the benefits are priceless. Work your way slowly if you can get one backlink a month, you should be happy. That backlink is going to be there to stay and you will reap its rewards for many years to come.
Summary - How to Dominate SEO with Backlinks
Backlinks are a vital component of every website. Without backlinks, your website has no influence. It is merely a web page that stands alone in a sea of websites.
Be careful with your backlink strategy. Never ever buy backlinks. Google’s algorithm does not know if you paid for it, but its mathematical algorithm is smart enough to figure out if your backlinks are not normal.
Try to do some guest posting, forum posting, or join Facebook Groups to build your backlink profile.
