What is a Backlink?

A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks are also called "inbound links" or "incoming links.” The best part of backlinks is that they help promote your blog or site just by being hyperlinks to you from another source. Easy enough, right? Well, not so fast. When it comes to backlinks, quality matters. Backlinks affect your SEO on a rankings level improving your SERP position if it is done correctly. Search engines use algorithms to gather information and rank pages, and they use bots to crawl your website for links. Search engines like Google combine the volume and relevance of all of the pages and domains that are providing backlinks to your website which leads to an impact on your page rank.  With this in mind, it is easy to understand that the higher the quality of the backlinks, the better your SERP position. 

What is Link Building?

As an overview link building is a process of establishing relevant hyperlinks also known as backlinks to a website from high-quality external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, This however is not guaranteed, link building is labour intensive as an activity and has no guarantee of success. The ideal outcome of this activity is to build high-quality backlinks thereby increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results.

What is good link building?

When it comes to backlinks, you want links from high-ranking pages with a good page authority score and low toxicity. Think of it like a vote of popularity: you want a vote from a respected source, not a questionable character since it affects how you are perceived by Search Engines. But how do we build these high-quality, low-toxicity links? 

What are the types of link building?

Since there are various ways to acquire backlinks, it is important to have a strategy in place to get them. Building backlinks doesn’t require any technical skills, it is more about hard work, networking and relationship building. Although there is an overwhelming agreement in the SEO consultancy community that the best way to get organic backlinks is through quality content since another site will only ever link to you if you give them a compelling reason to. There are many techniques you can use. 

Link Building through Guest Blogging

An overwhelming majority of specialists consider Guest Blogging to be one of the most effective ways to grow a backlink portfolio.  As part of the link-building strategy, guest posting serves as a means to increase the visibility of your website on someone’s blog by placing a link on it. The links may be placed either in the text body or in the “About the Author” section with a No-Follow attribute, provided the blog owner allows you to do this. In turn, you can place a link on your website to that blog, so the blogger increases their blog’s visibility as well. 

Link Building through Resources and Link List Pages

Resource pages and link lists are other strategies you can apply with the Long Tail keyword Prospects.  This strategy involves providing someone with your high-quality content as a resource page for a particular niche. For example, let's say you have exclusive content with sewing techniques. You can propose the source link to a website designed for sewers and makers, and perhaps they will place a link to your website.

Link Building through Digital PR and Content Submission

One of the most effective link-building strategies is the submission of news, press releases, research, opinions, guides, and other sorts of content on dedicated platforms. This strategy suits you well if you promote a particular product, be it e-commerce, apps, or services. 

Link Building through Collaboration with Users and Opinion Leaders

Reviews, testimonials, or interviews with users and well-known people amongst your audience are a breeding ground to grow your backlink portfolio and increase brand awareness.  Involve users in your brand promotion – run interviews, get high-quality reviews, and gather brand advocates. This strategy will definitely help your brand not only grow but also establish a strong relationship between the brand and its customers in the long run. Tip: Offer only proven information from real people that reflects a necessary point meeting your customers’ needs, be it a review, testimonial, or feedback. Focus on consistency, language, and the value this message brings. 

Link Building with the Skyscraper technique

One of the most effective strategies is picking popular content loaded with backlinks and making it better!  It is not as simple as it sounds, though. This strategy requires you to perform detailed research on the niche you are making content for. Pinpoint all the weak spots and omissions of the current content that targets your audience, including text structure, visual components, readability, and keyword density. Create something better than your competitors. Once better content is made, reach out to the websites that have backlinks to the original content, and ask them to replace one with yours.  Content topics can be found using Long Tail Keyword research, sites like People Also Ask and Google FAQs to find areas of interest to users.

Replicating Competitor Backlinks

This is one of the most popular strategies due to its simplicity and effectiveness. You just take the backlink profiles of your competitors, which you can find in the Backlink Analytics group of reports and spy on them to get more backlinks. Its working principle boils down to two key points, depending on your goals. If you want to improve rankings, this strategy helps you build the same backlink profile as your key competitors. If your goal is to increase traffic, you can peek inside and get some ideas on traffic-driving websites. Once you figure out where your rivals place their links, you can pinpoint the websites on which you also need to place your link.

Broken Backlinks

The goal of this strategy is to detect a broken link somewhere, report it to admins or webmasters, and try to get it replaced with a link of yours to the same sort of content.  The easiest way to do this is to look for the broken links of your rivals. It may seem a bit monotonous at first glance, but if applied correctly, this strategy might make a difference.  Once these pages are found, you can search them in order to find the sources leading to those pages. From here we will contact the owner of the source page and inform them that they have a targeted link that doesn’t work. A good reason to replace it with your relevant content instead!

Black Hat SEO and Link Building

One element of gaining backlinks that is critically important is not to use black hat techniques or other underhanded tactics to acquire them.  The Black Hat SEO promise of fast results can be tempting. However, these types of actions can and will backfire in the long run. These techniques are ineffective and a waste of money and are not sustainable over time. More importantly, these techniques can land you in trouble with Google and other Search Engines and will lead to penalties, resulting in huge rankings drops and a lower Conversion Rate. 

Are Backlinks Still Relevant in SEO?

Recently there has been a number of articles around the idea that backlinks may no longer be relevant for SEO, this is wrong.  Link Building is still a key part of any effective SEO strategy. Backlinks are still important for SEO and performance marketing because they are the foundation of Google’s original PageRank algorithm. Are you looking to improve the backlink profile of your website or just want to know how strong your current website’s SEO is? then get in touch with Target today and get your free Discovery call and Audit! .