What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are incoming links to a website from another website. A backlink is also known as an incoming link, inbound link, inlink or inward link. It is considered to be the most powerful ranking factor capable of pushing your website on the top search engines.
Mostly, a backlink profile is created by backlinks generated from external sources, more commonly known as referring domains that add to the general strength, applicability and variance of your domain’s backlink profile.
Backlinks can include links either from the same referring domains or multiple referring domains. They are accumulated because many websites want to be associated with unique content.
Why are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are important to both Search Engines as well as users. For Search Engines, they aid in identifying a page’s authority and eminence. At first, they were treated as an indicator of a webpage’s popularity.
But now they are evaluated on the basis of various industry-related factors and therefore laying less emphasis on quantity and more on the quality of sites from which the links emerge.
They are important for users because they provide a way for individuals to find various other sources of information on the same kind of topics.
For example, if a person visits a page on “best washing machines” then she might find links to other similar domains, washing machine providers, user-generated review pages, etc.
These links help in creating a strong consumer experience because they transfer the user to other sources of desirable information.
5 Smart Ways to Create Backlinks to Your Website
1. The Broken-link Building Method
This method is the best to create one-way backlinks. All you need to do is contact a webmaster to report broken links on her website. Simultaneously, you start recommending other websites to replace that link and then mention your own website there.
This works wonders as you’re doing the webmaster a favor by reposting the broken links but this increases the chances of a backlink back to your own website.
You will need to find authentic websites that have resources page. To find them use below mentioned search queries on Google-
Your keyword + links
Your keywords + resources
Keywords inurl:links
For example, if you have a textiles website, you will search for textiles + links. The next step is to find broken links, then go back to the webmaster. Inform them that someone is linking to some resources that are not working anymore.
Be careful to provide the precise location of the broken links, so that they can be found easily. Try to offer some alternatives to replace those broken links, as the name of your own website.
2. The Benefit of Guest Posting
Guest blogging is a great way to reach out to new audiences. Publish articles on famous websites and then you can get your content to reach the new readers to gain more exposure.
It is not just about increasing the backlinks but even about getting more and more social media followers. Thus, guest blogging helps in leveraging your relations and extending your audience.
3. Spy on Your Competitors: What are they Doing for Backlinks?
If you want to increase the amount of organic traffic to your website, then always be informed about all of the recent progressions of your main competitor's online marketing strategies.
You will have to keep a check on them on social media and try to find their link-building techniques, earning and content-forming methods.
It is quite simple if you follow a few steps, set yourself up for alarms when your competitors publish fresh content on their website. Subscribe to their email newsletters, follow them on social media and keep a check on their latest moves.
Notice if they are getting their links through guest blogging, if yes, and then try becoming a guest author on the same websites. Check if their links arrive from blog reviews. If yes, then contact those bloggers who review them and offer them a trial to test your tools. You might get lucky if they write a review about it.
Monitor Backlinks is a great tool to spy on your competitors. You can add to your list important ones and then get a regular report comprising of all the recent links they have earned. You can easily get more information about these links, or organize them by their worth or other SEO methods.
4. Donate
Yes you read it right! Donating to nonprofit organizations can help you earn backlinks. It is a simple and speedy method but you will have to search for websites which accept donations and then link back to all those sites which have donated.
Decide the amount of donation you want to make and then submit it while mentioning your website URL in the submission. In all, finding the websites which accept it can be quite a task and will demand some amount of research.
5. Never Shy Away From Promoting Your Content
Even if you have the most amazing content, that won’t help you get backlinks if you don’t promote that content in the right manner. You have to explore the world and engage in email outreach in order to promote even the best of your articles.
One of the strategies that you can adopt is to contact bloggers or websites which run weekly or monthly roundups. In this method too you can use Google and then search for queries, like “Keyword+ roundup”.
Do make sure that you choose to see results only of the past month or the week. The next step is to get in touch with webmasters and give them a good introduction of your website.
Just sending the message will not do, you will have to send them a link to one of your best guides or videos. If your proposal is liked by them, they may contact you in a few weeks time. All the bloggers online continuously try to find great content. That means they want to get a message from you.
Give Your Rankings a Boost With the Right Backlinks!
Refer to the right sources to find link-building opportunities. Earning backlinks can be tough but adopting the right methods can help you get them.
At the end just make sure that you keep track of your backlinks by using tools like Majestic or Ahrefs because that is as much important as building them.