What are backlinks? How do they work? What can they do to boost your local business?
For all your questions, you’ll find the answers here. In this guide, we explain how backlink building helps increase your business. We’ll also explain how some backlinks are bad and what you can do to remove them.
Read this guide to learn all about backlinks and backlinking strategy.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links on other websites that link back to your own website. They’re also called incoming links or inbound links and are a very important component of your overall search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Backlinks are not the same as internal links. An internal link is a link on your own website that links to a different page on your website. These don’t have the same effect on your search rank as high-quality backlinks.
Speaking of quality, not all backlinks are automatically good for your SEO. Some can even hurt your search rank. But we’ll explain more about this later.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
All search engines strive to provide the most relevant and informative results to their users. So, the search engines inspect every registered website looking for certain qualities that prove how helpful and trustworthy each site is.
One quality they look for is called “site authority.” There are certain SEO strategies you can implement that let search engines see your site as an authority in your niche.
Backlinking is one such strategy. When your backlinks appear on other authoritative sites, it makes you look authoritative as well. It shows that other sites trust you enough to use you as a source for their own content.
This, in turn, improves your search rank, which brings more people to your site. Then, you can work on converting your increased traffic into increased sales.
Bad Backlinks
As we said, not all backlinks are helpful. Specifically, there are some sneaky, dishonest SEO strategies that are meant to trick search engines.
These are called black hat SEO strategies and will penalize your search rank rather than help it. If search engines suspect your backlinks are a result of black hat SEO, you’ll be penalized.
Besides this, some backlinks just aren’t helpful because they are negative or irrelevant. For example, if your business sells cupcakes, but the backlink text says, “learn more about motorboats here,” it won’t improve your site authority.
Also, backlinks that say things like, “Don’t trust this site!” may hurt your site authority rating. However, you can typically fix damaging backlinks by petitioning to have them removed.
Good Backlinks
Backlinks like those above are one of the reasons why it’s so important to work on getting good backlinks. Positive backlinks on authoritative sites with relevant anchor text will improve your site authority and counter the effect of bad backlinks.
Backlinking Strategy
There are 4 main (acceptable) ways to build backlinks. First, be awesome. If you continuously provide valuable, authoritative content on your site, other reputable sites will naturally link to you on their own.
Second, guest post. That is, write content for other sites as a guest writer and include your backlink.
Be careful that the link is relevant and sounds natural. Otherwise, it will penalize your search rank instead of helping it.
Third, partner with other site owners. Perhaps you can arrange to write reviews of each other’s products and include backlinks.
Lastly, recruit professional help. You already have enough business-boosting strategies to manage. Let some experienced SEO pros handle this one for you.
Need Help Building Backlinks?
What are backlinks? Now you know: they’re your ticket to establishing authority in your niche.
Therefore, please don’t hesitate to ask us for help. Contact us here today so we can start working on your backlinking strategy.
