Search engine optimization (SEO) has become an important part of online marketing today for online and offline businesses alike. One of the most important aspects of SEO is backlink building. This SEO tutorial gives more information about the importance of backlinks in online marketing and gives tips in helping you build backlinks.
Importance of backlinks in SEO
Backlinks, as the name suggests, are links from another site to yours. Also known as inbound links, these are crucial in SEO, as these essentially indicate how popular and trusted your website is. As what you can read in an SEO tutorial, there are two kinds of backlinks: one-way and reciprocal. One-way backlinks are websites linking back to you without requiring you to link back to them, while reciprocal links are websites backlinking to each other. In SEO, one-way inbound links are more valued and will get you indexed much faster compared to reciprocal links.
Why is it important to build backlinks? As what you can read in an average SEO tutorial, backlinks are important because they increase the possibility of your website being indexed much faster by search engines. As what an SEO tutorial will tell you, search engines are always on the lookout for quality websites, and backlinks are essentially votes that your website contains good content, as it means these websites trust your website enough that they are willing to link back to it. As such, there will be a higher possibility of increase in web traffic going your way. Furthermore, having several sites point to your own website can possibly increase the number of your visitors that you get on your site, since they have the option of clicking the backlink to your site from the original website. In short, building backlinks will lead to higher traffic, which is essentially the goal of all online marketers.
However, it’s not enough for you to build backlinks left and right. As what you can read in an SEO tutorial, search engines are more in favor of quality than quantity. Backlinks are considered as quality links if these fulfill two criteria:
- That the link goes back to your site using the keyword that you want optimized; and
- That the website that posts the backlink belongs to the same niche or carries similar content that you have on your website. For example, if your niche is related to weight loss products, a backlink from a website that talks about weight loss and fitness will be more relevant compared to a website that talks about dogs (not unless you website is about weight loss for dogs!)
According to an SEO tutorial, a website that has few but quality backlinks will have a higher chance of being indexed much faster compared to a website that has dozens of backlinks but have low quality.
Don’t attempt to cheat banklinks as well, such as by linking to your own web pages. Search engines are not fans of cheating, and you can end up suffering the penalty of having your website not indexed at all. Furthermore, search engines are suspicious of websites that grew dozens of backlinks within a short period of time. As such, make sure to do natural link building to avoid being penalized by search engines.
Where to get backlinks
Backlink building can be very difficult, especially if you have no idea how to get other websites to post links directing to your site. This part of the SEO tutorial lists down the possible sources of where you can get backlinks.
Believe it or not, there are several possible sources of backlinks that you can look into. As what you can find in an SEO tutorial, these include:
- Article marketing. According to the average SEO tutorial, article marketing is the simplest way for you to get backlinks. What you will need to do is to write articles and submit these to article directories or post as a guest blogger in another website and post a link to your site within the article to get the backlink. The more articles you submit, the more backlinks you get.
- Other websites. You can also ask website owners from the same link to post backlinks to your site. You will need to introduce yourself to that person well and build a relationship with that person in order for you to get the backlink. Do note that some websites post backlinks for a certain fee.
- Forums. You can also participate in forums related to your niche and post the link to your website for backlinking purposes. However, do remember to observe proper netiquette and not spam the forums with links to your site. A lot of forums have rules about posting links, and violating these rules can get you kicked out of the site. A safe way to promote your site in forums is by posting the link on your signature.
- Directories. There are actually websites that essentially serve as directories for people who are interested in having these sites link to them.
- Answer sites. As with online forums, you can also participate on answer sites as a way for you to get the backlinks. Do make sure that you only post links to your website on relevant questions, instead of giving the link left and right without a care whether it is actually helpful to the person answering the question or not.
- Hiring an SEO company to do the work for you. If you don’t want to do the backlink building yourself, you can always hire a third-party company to do the backlinks for you. Just make sure that the firm you hire will actually get quality backlinks, as there are some organizations that are notorious for getting low-quality backlinks that can lead to your website being penalized by search engines.
Backlink building can be difficult and even tedious at times. However, your efforts will pay off as this can potentially lead to an improve page ranking and higher traffic. Follow the tips listed in this SEO tutorial to make the most out of backlinks.