Backlink: A to Z Ultimate Guide from Beginner to Advanced

The backlink is the most common term or word that is widely used in the world of search engine optimizations (SEO). Backlinks also called "inbound links" or "incoming links," are created when one website links to another. The link to an external website is called a backlink.

Most of the newbie bloggers struggle to understand this term what the term "backlink" means.

This article is A to Z guide that will help you to understand what backlinks are, why they are essential to SEO, why they are important for your online success and also how to create backlinks, what are the anatomy of perfect backlinks, how to build quality backlinks etc.

What is Backlink?

Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain; essentially linking back from their domain to yours. To a larger degree, your backlink profile is made up of backlinks from external sites (also known as referring domains) that contribute to the overall strength, relevance, and diversity of your domain’s backlink profile.

In the past, backlinks were the major metric for the ranking of a webpage because a page with a lot of backlinks tended to rank higher on all major search engines, including Google. There was a time when low-quality links also help to rank your site in search engine but ever since Google rolled out its Penguin algorithm, the whole landscape of backlinking has changed.

Now, Backlinks which are coming from authoritative sites and are contextual can only help your site to rank high in search engines. For example, You have a blogging site and you are creating links from other niche sites about pet animals then these links will be of no use.Your goal should be to get links from authoritative and relevant sites.

Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a "vote of confidence" from one site to another. In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content.

Glossary of Common Terms Related to Backlinks:

Here are a few common terms that you should know while creating backlinks. Don't overlook these term, Just read once to better understand the term backlink.

• Link Juice: It is a slang term referring to how powerful a certain link (within a site or from one website to another) is or could be. The idea is that a link from a well-known website that is trusted by the search engines will pass more "juice" than one on a pointless directory.

• No-Follow Link: A No Follow tag is a way that allows webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link." A link can have one or more rel attributes, where "rel" is short for "relationship".

• Do-Follow Link: Dofollow links allow google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. Giving us link juice and a backlink. If a webmaster is linking back to you with this link both Search Engine and Humans will be able to follow you. The best way to give someone dofollow love is allowing keyword in the anchor text.

• Linking Root Domains: Linking Root Domains are the number of unique domains linking to your domain or page. Multiple backlinks from a single domain will be grouped and counted as a one linking root domain. By filtering incoming links based on root domains, you get an accurate overview of your backlink profile.

• Low-Quality Links: Low-quality links are links that come from harvested sites, automated sites, spam sites, or even porn sites. Such links do far more harm than good. This is one reason you should be careful when buying backlinks.

• Internal Links: Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They are commonly used in the main navigation. These type of links are useful for three reasons: They allow users to navigate a website. They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.

• Anchor Text: Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you're linking to, rather than generic text. The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underlining through HTML code.

Advantages of Backlinks in SEO:

High-quality backlinks are a major piece of Google’s algorithm and they will continue to be, as they can be the deciding factor that pushes a website to the top of the search results. While link building efforts are done solely for search engine optimization purposes, they are beneficial for several other reasons.

• Improves Organic Ranking: If your blog article is getting organic links from other authoritative blogs then your article will naturally rank higher with search engines.
• Faster Indexing: Backlinks help search engine bots discover links to your site and crawl your site effectively. Especially for a new website, it is important to get backlinks as they help in the faster discovery and indexing of your site.
• Referral Traffic: Not all website traffic originates from a search on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or another search engine. Referral traffic is also a large percentage of all traffic, meaning that people are clicking on links within the content and being taken to the linked content.
• Brand Authority: Sure, getting links on popular websites is great for your SEO efforts, but they also help to build the authority of your brand. The same way Google looks as these links as a good indication that your website provides useful information, consumers see it as a good indication that your brand is one that they should take an interest in.
• Building Relationships: When someone reads good content and sees a backlink pointing to the source or creator, there is a very good chance that they will click on the link to learn more about who or what is responsible for what they just enjoyed.
• Long Term Directory & Resource Links: The internet is one big source of data that will continue to grow and always be there to access information from. If you obtain high-quality links from reputable directories and other resource websites it can help to drive traffic to your website for years to come.

The Anatomy Of The Perfect Backlink:

Lets straight come to the point, If you really want to get benefits from the backlinks you build then they should meet the criteria below and these are the only type of link you should be building to your site.

They provide the most bang for the buck in terms of passing authority and rankings to your site and will help to accelerate the success of your site.

• Site Authority: One of the strongest signals to look at is the authority of the site & page a link is coming from. The perfect backlink always comes from an authoritative domain.
• Relevance: Relevancy is becoming more and more important and the perfect backlink comes from a relevant page and/or domain.
• Placement: Google understands where links are placed and links that are placed inline of editorial context are far stronger than any other. Nothing will beat the power of a contextual link inline with relevant content.
• Anchor Text: Anchor text can be tricky as there is no one size fits all glove recommendation but as a general rule you want all of your exact match/phrase match anchor text backlinks to be coming from authoritative domains.
• Outbound Links: The more outbound links there are, the more ‘link juice’ you have to share. The perfect backlink would not have more than 10 outbound links on the page. In general though, the fewer outbound links – the better.

How to Start Getting Backlinks?

Now as you have understood the meaning of backlink, Let's learn a few simple techniques for generating backlinks to your site but keep in mind it is not the number of backlinks which matters, but rather the quality of backlinks.

• Write awesome articles: If you write awesome articles, people will naturally link to them.
• Use Broken link building method: Broken link building is the link building method that is a white-hat link building strategy which acquires links by finding broken links, reproducing that broken link's content, and helping webmasters convert broken links with your corrected link for link building purposes.
• Create cornerstone articles (Piller articles): Cornerstone articles are usually relatively long, informative articles, combining insights from different blog posts and covering everything that's important about a certain topic. Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic, rather than to sell products.
• Start guest blogging: Guest blogging helps you to get solid one-way backlinks as well as more traffic and better search engine visibility.
• Submit to web directories: This method is not very popular these days because finding a legal web directory is not easy. You must especially avoid those web directories that ask you to create a backlink to their website to get your website into their directory.

I hope this article will help you understand the basics of backlinks in SEO, and why you should start working on getting backlinks for your blog.

Do you currently work on getting backlinks for your blog?  Tell us about your experiences in the comments section below.

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