Quality backlinks are important for any website that’s looking to increase traffic. It helps users learn more about the brand or fetch information better. If somebody links their content to your website, you have a backlink from them. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? However, getting backlinks involves strategy and planning. Google has mentioned backlinks as one of the most important search ranking factors. Let us understand the benefits of backlinking and what makes a good backlink.
Better rankings
Getting backlinks to your website can help you rank better on Google. The more backlinks you have, the more google helps you rank for those particular queries. Studies done by Ahrefs show that the number of quality backlinks from websites goes hand-in-hand with organic search traffic.
Visibility
Search engines discover new content by revisiting pages that they have already discovered. They revisit popular ones frequently and your content has the chance to be discovered if you’re getting backlinks from popular pages.
Referral traffic
Very simply put, when the content produced is authentic and beneficial, people take the time to visit links added by the publisher as they have built credibility. As more people visit links that direct them to your site, your referral traffic increases.
What makes a backlink useful?
Credible sources
A page’s authority highly matters when getting backlinks. Google has mentioned that the higher the authority the website has, the more it can transfer the authority to your website through quality backlinks. Try to reach out to high domain authority websites, they may be difficult to obtain but they are worth it as it can improve your organic traffic in just a few days. You can even make use of paid backlinks.
Include your keyword in the anchor text
Ensure that the visible text that links the user to your site (also known as anchor text) includes the keyword you want to rank for. Paraphrasing or re-wording the anchor text may reduce your chance of producing quality backlinks. However, Google can also find out if you are using black hat techniques such as using way too many keyword-rich anchor texts.
Relevancy
As mentioned earlier, getting backlinks need to be done organically. So, choose topics or content that is relevant to your site and content. It doesn’t have to be too specific, for example, if the topic is on work stress, then you can link it to a site that focuses on mental health. This way you are making use of the target group that is using the site already and enabling them to find similar content.
Link from different websites or varied referring domains
Quality backlinks are very much important, but if Google’s algorithm finds out that you are getting backlinks from the same website multiple times, it’s simply not as powerful. It’s better to get links from 100 websites than 1,000 links from the very same website. You can experiment with varied links from different domains, both directly and indirectly related to the destination URL. Using sites that are indirectly related can bring in new users, while sites that are indirectly related can bring target audiences. For example, you can check out this backlink created for a healthcare site mFine which directs users to the destination blogs URL.
Make use of no-follow and do-follow backlinks
No follow backlinks are hyperlinks with a ‘no-follow’ tag. These links cannot influence Google’s search engine rankings because it doesn’t transfer page rank or anchor text across them. Basically, it does not affect the destination URL as google does not crawl no-follow links. So, make sure that your backlinks do not have the ‘no-follow’ tags. These no-follow links were initially created to reduce spam and comment spams.
While getting backlinks may seem easy, it is important to create quality backlinks. Make use of tools like ahrefs to understand how many backlinks your site has and start creating links. Keep in mind that domain authority, traffic, relevance, anchor texts, no-follow links and the number of times you’re getting backlinks from the same site all matter. Once you have ensured that all of these requirements have been met, you are definitely going to see an increase in your traffic. Backlinks are an important part of any website that wants to hold a strong online presence, so start slowly and work your way up after analysing what is working for your site.