What are Backlinks and how it works?

If you want to drive organic traffic to your website, then you have to understand the importance “backlinks” aspect of SEO.

Organic traffic to the website requires the use of both on-page and off-page SEO techniques.

Backlinks are one of the most important aspects of off-page SEO. Among the hundreds of factors that rank in Google, these are the two main factors:

Quality of content: The ability of solving user’s problems
Number of backlinks

In this article, we will learn more about backlinks in depth, what are backlinks, why it is important for you and many more. So, let’s go start:

What is Backlinks?

A backlink (also known as inbound link) is a link that redirects the audience from another website to a web page on your website.

The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you to rank higher in search engines such as Google, Bing and more.

Visually, backlinks can be placed in text, in an image, or as a button. As long as the source is on a separate website, these links will be counted as backlinks.

On-page optimization is the process of creating content that helps search engines and users understand what your website is about. Whereas, off-page SEO demonstrates to search engines that your content provides value to the audience. And the most value in off page is of backlinks.

Why are Backlinks Important?

Backlinks are especially valuable because they represent a vote of confidence from one site to another.

Backlinks to your website are signals to search engines that make it clear that your site is liked by people. When multiple sites link to a single web page or website, search engines infer that your site is eligible to appear in SERPs.
Therefore, earning more backlinks can result in a major improvement in the ranking or search visibility of the site.

Link building is not limited to increasing the SEO score and visibility on Google, but it also shows where your site has relationships to other larger sites (Forbes, WPBeginner, Inc, etc) – and reminds readers that the website is being operated by a human.

In general, backlinks represent a relationship between two sites, and each one serves to help the other grow.

However, it’s incredibly difficult for small businesses and startups to get links from large sites. If you want to improve SEO incredibly well, you have to earn high quality backlinks.

Type of Backlinks

In general, there are only two types of backlinks: dofollow and nofollow. However, there is no difference between dofollow and nofollow by audience. Based on these, it is decided by Google and other engines which places websites are worthy of in the ranks.

So let’s see what are the uses of dofollow and nofollow in our SEO profile:

Dofollow

Dofollow links are links that allow other sites and search engine bots to follow your site. The passing of authority is called “link juice”. Getting dofollow links will help in improving the domain’s authority or domain rating of the website.

By default, links are dofollow so there is no need for “rel=dofollow” when creating links to the website.

Dofollow links try to tell Google and other search engines that the content on the other end of this link is important. Which should be read by visitors to understand the whole thing.

Although, there is nothing different about this link, it’s just a regular link. This is one reason why dofollow links are the most common and valuable.

Nofollow

Nofollow links are another type of backlink. Which does not pass authority on the website it is linking to.

For a link to become nofollow, the code “rel=nofollow” must be added when linking to a website.

Nofollow links don’t pass PageRank, plus they don’t necessarily help you rank higher in SERPs. However, Google announced in September 2019 that they have developed the nofollow feature.

A website should have a different dofollow vs nofollow link set. Typically, dofollow and nofollow link percentages are 70:30. Google wants to see a good mix of both for a healthy link profile.

What Types of Backlinks are Valuable?

Not all links can be made equal, meaning some links for your website will be of high quality and some of low quality.

But the thing to note is that if you want to rank high in SERPs, then pay attention to quality links. Because a single quality backlink can be more powerful than hundreds of low quality backlinks.

To have a high quality backlink one must have the following same key traits:

To Build a Backlink, Choose the Trusted and Authoritative Website

Firstly, it’s important to understand what domain authority is.

By definition, Domain Authority (also known as authority of site) is a metric used by SEO to estimate how “Rankable” a website is as a whole.

According to this concept, the more authority a site has, the more authority it can pass to the site (through a link).

For example, here’s a link that got from Neilpatel. According to Moz, the domain authority of these site is 90 that is great.

Because this link comes from a high authority site, Google gives more authority on it and places it on the first page in the search result.

Although getting links from higher authority is a difficult task, it is not impossible.

Include your Target Keyword in the Link’s Anchor Text

As we know that anchor text is the visible part of a link.

In general, you want the anchor text of your link to be your target keyword. Because Google quickly identifies your backlink anchor text for your target keyword and ranks it higher.

It is a matter of caution that “Google Penguin” is a filter in Google’s algorithms. So, you should avoid overboard of keyword-rich anchor text.

Google’s filter specifically focuses on websites that build backlinks with exact match anchor text. It’s easy to say that the Google penguin avoided to black hat link building strategy.

The Webpage or Site Linking to You must be Related to Your Website

When linking one site to another, it is important to see that they are both related. Because Google monitors such websites which are different from each other.

Suppose that you have just published an article on digital marketing. In that case, putting a fitness-related link in you puts a lot of weight on it.

That’s why you should try to get links from these websites which are basically related to your website niche

Go to the Dofollow Link

All other search engines, including Google, ignore links with the “nofollow” tag.

To get rank in google, you should insist on creating a dofollow link. Because nofollow links are not counted by search engine algorithms.

Most links that contain the nofollow tag are not valuable. For example, the following sources have nofollow links:

Blog comment
Press releases
Paid advertisement

These links are not helpful for SEO. This doesn’t mean that getting nofollow links is a bad things. Nofollow link can generate traffic to your website as well as diversity your your backlinks portfolio.
It’s now clear that a natural backlinks profile consists of a distribution of both dofolllow and nofollow backlinks.

How Can You make Backlinks?

When you know that backlinks are important, it is important to know how you get links. pointing to your website, we ask you what is your best link building strategy.

When it comes to ranking in search engines, link building is vital to the success of any SEO campaign.

Only one method is not enough to create backlinks, there is a need to change the strategy from time to time.

In spite of using backlink technology in the past, today according to the instructions of new technology, you can get backlink for any of your content.

You can use the following strategies as per the new instructions:

Guest post
Broken link
Write quality blog posts in your industry

There are many more ways to manage and understand your backlink profile. Semrush, Majestic and Moz are powerful SEO tools that help you to optimize your link profile.

Conclusion

Get unique and high quality links to improve your SEO to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs). Now you need to use new technology to get authorized link because now google algorithms has changed.

Google’s algorithm for link evaluation has quickly evolved to focus on the quality of the link, not the quantity. Which might make your SEO link building strategy more challenging than ever before.

You can checkout article on “Link Building Strategies and Resources for Busy Marketers” to learn more new technique.

I hope this article helps you to understand backlinks to make backlink profile effective. Also, you might checkout another helpful article on 5 important factors on-page SEO to rank in SERPs.

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