What Are Backlinks in SEO? — People First Content

What are backlinks?

In the simplest terms, backlinks are hyperlinks that send someone from a website to another website.

There are two types of backlinks: do-follow and no-follow. Do-follow links are created when a blogger or webmaster adds an HTML attribute to the anchor text or link pointing to the page they want to link to. On the other hand, no-follow links don’t have this attribute, so search engines treat them as regular text and not as a link.

No website is an island-you can quote me on that-so backlinks are the cornerstone of an effective digital marketing campaign.

In SEO (search engine optimization), backlinks are critical in determining how well a site ranks on SERPs (search engine results pages).

Read on to learn more about backlinks, why they matter for SEO, and how to get more backlinks for your small business.

Importance of Using Backlinks for SEO

Imagine a scenario: you have a lemonade stand where you’re selling the best lemonade that lemon and sugar can make. Your lemonade stand has a fresh coat of paint, it’s a beautiful hot day, and you’re right next to a garage sale.

All you have to do is sit back and wait for the customers.

But they don’t come. So you sit all day under the hot sun, sure you’ve done everything right, and yet with no results to show from it.

And then you see another lemonade stand across the road. It doesn’t seem half as put together as yours, but the line stretches out of sight.

You discover that when people have been asking about lemonade, the people running the garage sale have been referring them to your competition.

What have we learned?

The moral of the story here is that if you want potential customers to find you, one of the best ways is to have someone send them your way.

Backlinks are the internet’s form of word of mouth, and word of mouth marketing is super effective. For example, 90% of people are more likely to trust a brand that’s recommended to them. Backlinks harness that power.

What Do Backlinks Do?

Backlinks are helpful on two counts:

1. Making you more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines

The whole point of SEO is making your content easy to find, but some people abuse SEO tips to promote shoddy content.

Google and other search engines have a host of ways to figure out if your content is worth finding. And one way is assessing how many other websites have decided your content is worth referencing.

Backlinks act as digital votes of confidence. They mean someone found your content or site worthy of being referenced.

A way to get a bead on how you’re doing is by checking your domain authority. Domain authority is a metric the SEO website Moz came up with to quantify how likely your content is to appear in search results. It’s a number between 1 and 100 that relies on how many links you have and how quality the website links to you.

If the New York Times thinks your content is good enough to reference, that’s good enough for Google. However, if Joe Blow links to you on their spam-filled website, it’s not going to work for you.

2. Generating organic traffic

Another huge bonus is the organic traffic that backlinks can send your way.

You can assume that if someone is referencing your website, they’re probably in the same industry with a similar audience. So when a website mentions you, they’re essentially funneling high-quality leads to your site.

If you’re researching, let’s say, lemonade recipes, you’re probably looking for lemons and sugar. So if a recipe blog links to websites that sell those products, you’re likely to take the path of least resistance.

Just one link from a related website can be a game-changer, especially if they have a larger audience than you.

So how do you personally harness the power of backlinks?

How To Get Backlinks

Now that you’re sold on the power of backlinks, you’re probably wondering how to use them.

This is the fast answer. You get backlinks by building quality content that attracts people who then share it across their social media platforms or reference it on their website.

But it can be challenging to get going from a standstill, so here’s a list of tactics for increasing the backlinks to your website.

Any and all of these methods are useful for building backlinks!

Check out our guides to guest blogging and infographics to learn how to get started.

Penalties for Bad Backlinks

One word of warning is not to try to take shortcuts in this process. Some websites use tactics like buying large quantities of backlinks from other websites.

Any links that are spam, unnatural, or irrelevant count against you.

Google and other search engines frown on this and will penalize your website for that kind of manipulation.

The Penguin algorithm update stopped a lot of link manipulation, so make sure to read over the guidelines if you’re ever unsure about your process.

A rule of thumb: no trickery is better than producing quality content that spreads organically.

Conclusion

Customers and search engines both like to see that others trust a business. Building your company’s ethos through backlinks is a concrete place to start with that process.

But covering all your bases in a digital marketing plan can spread you thin. Luckily we can help. Our team of writers and designers at People First Content can help you create the kind of content people want to share. Contact us today!

Originally published at https://www.peoplefirstcontent.com on March 15, 2022.